Jim Irsay was a competitive super heavyweight power lifter, weighing 307 pounds, eating 20,000 calories a day at the same time he was Colts GM.
INDIANAPOLIS -- Before he was the Indianapolis Colts owner worth $3.4 billion, before he was the NFL's youngest general manager, before he was a football player at Southern Methodist University, before he pumped iron as a teen at the YMCA, Jim Irsay was a"fat kid with glasses" who tagged along with his dad, Robert Irsay, to the Baltimore Colts' training camp.
Back in Chicago where he lived when he wasn't at Colts camp with his dad, who owned the team, Irsay started going to the old YMCA in Evanston, Ill., by Northwestern University. It was a modest gym. The weight equipment was from the 1950s. But it worked.And there was a guy in blue jeans and work boots who came in each day. Irsay, 15 at the time, watched in awe as that guy squatted 415 pounds in tight denim and steel-toed shoes. He was 5-8, in his early to mid-30s and weighed about 215 pounds.
In the wee hours of a rainy night in 1984, when the Colts made their secret move from Baltimore to Indianapolis, Irsay found that guy, a guy who turned Irsay into a power lifting beast.Most NFL teams didn't have a strength coach in the early 1980s, but the Baltimore Colts did. His name was Mike Westhoff and his main job with the team was to coach the offensive line, tight ends and special teams.
Irsay, never one to not say what he thought, put it right back to Westhoff."I don’t know Mike, you say that, but we’ll see. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you're not." Irsay ran back inside and hunted down Kush. He told him Zupancic was outside and wanted to talk. Kush, it seemed, had no desire to go back out in the rain.
"When I met him, he was what I’d call a casual lifter, not an athlete of any certain ilk," Zupancic said."He was just an average athlete." "He has some of the hardest drive that I've ever seen a person have, drive, determination and grit," Zupancic said."When he says he is going to do something, bet on it. It’s going to happen."
As the music blared and as their general manager grunted, going for insane reps, Colts players would gather in the weight room to watch. He would go to Wendy's for lunch, get two double cheeseburgers, a chicken sandwich, a fish sandwich, two large French fries, four cartons of milk and eight cookies. As Zupancic drove, about 45 minutes out from the tournament, Irsay started drinking the water from a gallon milk jug. He was about three quarters of the way through the jug when Zupancic got lost.
But that tournament didn't turn out exactly as Irsay had hoped. The three judges didn't give him the marks it took to move on to the next round. "He decided he wanted to run a marathon," Zupancic says laughing."Let me tell you, the legs that do a 700-pound squat don’t do marathons."He lost 60 pounds and ran 26.2 miles, finishing his races in three hours and 40 minutes. And that feat, Irsay said, wasn't all that different from lifting monstrous amounts of weight.
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