Walter Payton and Matt Suhey, backfield mates turned brothers, and a bond that transcends time

Eleven years and a lot of life had happened since the tailback and the fullback ran together. The old teammates didn’t socialize much even though both remained in the Chicago area.

Matt Suhey, the fullback, traded soybean meal futures and owned a bottled water company. He left home for the Board of Trade every morning at 5:30, returned home to his family at 6:30 in the evening and didn’t have time for much else.

Walter Payton was in perpetual motion — the tailback was always most comfortable that way. He traveled about four days a week for appearances, speeches and various business ventures. He held ownership stakes in an automobile racing team, nightclubs, a restaurant and a heavy equipment company. He oversaw a charitable foundation, was a member of the Bears’ board of directors, and worked diligently and passionately in pursuit of an NFL expansion team in St. Louis.

But one day between Christmas in 1998 and New Year’s Day, Payton asked Suhey to meet for dinner. They exchanged hugs in a private room at Millrose in Barrington, not far from Payton’s home, and started laughing like they did in the old days. Suhey joked about Payton’s weight loss, probably close to 50 pounds.

Payton turned on him.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said, jutting his face toward Suhey’s.

“What do you mean?” Suhey said.

Payton had been diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare liver disease. He also had cancer of the bile duct, and it was spreading rapidly.

He needed a new liver.

Two days after their dinner, Suhey called Payton, who told him he was going to the Mayo Clinic. Suhey’s purpose on the football field had been to make sure Payton got to where he wanted to be, so the fullback told the tailback he was coming with him. Payton followed his lead.

In the months that followed and as the clock on Payton’s life neared zero, they still laughed together. “We’re doing a new version of ‘Brian’s Song,’” Payton said. “The only difference is the Black guy dies.”

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“Brian’s Song” won four Emmy Awards and was the most-watched TV movie in 1971, when made-for-television movies were appointment viewing. Starring Billy Dee Williams and James Caan, it told the story of the odd-couple friendship between Bears running backs Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo as Piccolo was dying from cancer.

Four years after the movie debuted, the Bears chose Payton with the fourth pick of the draft. By 1980, when the Bears selected Suhey in the second round of the draft, Payton had been voted All-Pro four times, NFL Most Valuable Player and NFL Man of the Year. He was celebrated for his style — refusing to run out of bounds, choosing punishment over preservation, popping up from the big hit with a smile and no indication of pain.

Initially, Payton shunned Suhey. The fullback who helped make Payton a luminary was Roland Harper, who was also Payton’s closest confidant and hunting partner. But Harper’s knees were betraying him, and everyone could see Suhey was drafted to replace him. On the rare occasions when Payton acknowledged Suhey, he called him “short white boy.”

In the opening game of Suhey’s second season against the Packers, Harper was injured. With 32 seconds remaining and the Bears trailing by seven, Suhey took a handoff at the Packers’ 3 and was one step away from scoring when he fumbled. The Packers recovered and won the game.

Suhey was devastated. As he walked to the locker room, Payton smiled at him and asked if he ever had a paper route. Suhey asked what he was talking about. With a giggle, Payton told him if he ever fumbled like that again he would need to find a paper route because his football career would be over. Suhey couldn’t help but laugh.

The following Sunday, Payton fumbled twice, including on the 1-yard line, in a loss to the 49ers. After the flight home from San Francisco, Suhey and running back Dave Williams got in Suhey’s car to drive to The Snuggery in Edison Park. Then Suhey heard a knock on his window.

“Where you going?” Payton asked.

Payton went, too. For the first time, Payton and Suhey had a real conversation, talking well into Monday morning. When Suhey went to Halas Hall the following Wednesday, something had changed.

Before long, their relationship became a marriage without the rings and roses, a lifetime commitment to the other’s well-being, a personal co-dependency and business partnership.

They were wired differently as football players. Suhey was obsessive about details and assignments; Payton played like a poet freestyles. In “Never Die Easy,” his autobiography, Payton jokingly complained that Suhey’s copious questions in meetings took years off his life. But the fullback’s steadiness grounded Payton.

Although it seemed as if they had nothing in common except the game they loved, there was a connective tissue between them that couldn’t be quantified. They usually lined up in the I-formation, which they made the We-formation. Payton seemed to know how Suhey would block, and Suhey seemed to understand where Payton would step.

They worked out hand signals to communicate presnap adjustments, which were critical because quarterback Jim McMahon audibled frequently. “If we were going to make a mistake, my thing was we both were going to be wrong,” Suhey says.

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When Payton broke the all-time rushing record with a 6-yard run against the Saints in 1984, Suhey threw the lead block, crushing linebacker Dennis Winston off-tackle. Afterward, Payton took Suhey to a blues bar on the South Side of Chicago where they partied with Jim Brown, whose record Payton broke. Then Payton gifted Suhey with a shotgun worth about $10,000.

Suhey and Payton played golf together. Suhey remembers him often hitting a 1-iron off the tee. They shot pool and played a lot of cards, Hearts being their favorite. On bus rides, they sat in aisle seats across from one another. Before road games, they sometimes roomed together.

Bears middle linebacker Mike Singletary had a neighboring hotel room to the running backs the week before Super Bowl XX.

“Whenever practice was finished, Walter would fire up the music box, throw open his hotel door and start jamming,” Singletary wrote in “Calling The Shots.” “You could hear the two of them next door dancing, wrestling, acting like a couple of 12-year-olds.”

Their lockers were side by side in an area of the locker room Payton called “The Ghetto.” Suhey was the only white player in “The Ghetto,” but he belonged as much as anyone, partly because of his relationship with Payton.

“I never thought of him as Walter Payton, my Black friend,” Suhey says. “And I’m pretty sure he didn’t think of me as his white friend.”

Payton said Suhey was one of the first white people he knew well.

“We were Ebony and Ivory before Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney,” Payton once said. “I think our relationship helped break down a lot of lines, a lot of racial lines, on the team and some said in the city.”

In a preseason game, Bears offensive linemen Mark Bortz and Keith Van Horne got into it with Cowboys defensive lineman Randy White after the Cowboys were unnecessarily rough with Payton. Chaos reigned. That’s when Payton wanted Suhey with him.

“Back-to-back!” Payton told Suhey, locking arms with him, their backs pressed against each other’s.

“What’s this?” Suhey said.

“Back-to-back,” Payton said. “That’s how we take them.”

The great Payton was in a stratosphere of his own in the team hierarchy, but Suhey knew how to bring him down a level. When Payton teased Suhey for going to Penn State, Suhey asked him where Payton’s alma mater, Jackson State, was located. When Suhey started losing his hair, Payton complained about the reflection from his head. Suhey ribbed Payton about his Jheri curl.

Suhey was a foil for Payton’s practical jokes. Payton called Suhey’s wife, Donna, and, with a high-pitched voice, told her he was Matt’s pregnant girlfriend. Donna believed Payton until he cracked up.

Once, Payton lined up behind Suhey in an I-formation in practice, and Payton pulled down Suhey’s pants as Suhey was about to take off. A photograph of the prank later became famous. Suhey has a copy in his office.

When the Bears went to Platteville for training camp in 1984, Payton didn’t want to stay in a dorm room, so he rented a motorhome. Then Payton and Suhey drove it over four hours from Chicago.

“We were like Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton (from ‘The Honeymooners’),” Suhey says. “We didn’t know where we were going, and the motorhome was so wide on narrow roads. We pulled through a McDonald’s drive-through in it. We had a lot of laughs.”

Payton wasn’t always goofing around. He could be moody and mercurial, and he kept secrets. Suhey, more than anyone in Payton’s football life, always seemed to have the right touch, knowing when and how to give him space or draw him out.

Payton was crushed after fumbling on the Bears’ second offensive play of the Super Bowl. He went to the sideline and talked to Suhey. There was no redemption; Payton ran for only 61 yards on 22 carries and didn’t score. Rather than celebrate the victory, he sulked.

“He was pretty upset,” Suhey says. “It was one of his dreams to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl.”

Instead of waiting for the team flight home the next morning, Payton returned on a private jet, taking only his son, Jarrett, and Suhey. That night, Suhey knew better than to tease Payton about his Super Bowl performance. But later, he couldn’t help himself.

“You may be the greatest player ever in the NFL, but I scored a touchdown in the Super Bowl and you didn’t,” he told him.

“Read between the lines,” Payton said, holding up his index finger, middle finger and ring finger.

Suhey’s youngest son, Scott, was born on March 4, 1994 (3/4/94) at 10:34 a.m., and Suhey called his old teammate, No. 34. He told Payton how the numbers aligned.

“I’m his godfather,” Payton responded. And he was.

After Payton became ill, he could no longer drive. But he was uncomfortable staying in one place all day, so Suhey took him for rides in his Mercedes 430. Suhey estimates they went on as many as 40 drives. Payton, the one-time race car driver, criticized Suhey’s cautious approach behind the wheel, telling him his driving would kill him before the cancer did.

Dairy Queen was a regular destination, but often they just drove. When Suhey would tire, he’d ask Payton if he wanted to go home. “Keep driving,” was often the reply.

“I think he was trying to soak up those moments,” Jarrett says.

“Sometimes on those rides, he was chatty as a bird,” Suhey says. “Other times he wouldn’t say a word. We talked about his favorite restaurants, and some he wanted to go to. He loved P.F. Chang’s, and we went there. I wanted to take him to Francesco’s Hole in the Wall, but we never made it.”

Late in Payton’s life, he asked Suhey to drive him to Singletary’s house, then gave him directions. Suhey rang the bell, but Singletary didn’t answer. That’s when Suhey looked back to see Payton cracking up. Suhey had been had again.

“Matt helped me laugh and after I got sick, I needed that more than ever,” Payton said.

Payton refused to allow anyone to accompany him to radiation and chemo treatments except Suhey, who took him to about nine doctor’s appointments. Payton usually wanted to have his chemo administered at midnight when his presence wouldn’t create a stir. Suhey was by his side.

“Walter was a loner,” his wife, Connie, says. “There weren’t a lot of people he would hang out with. He was strange like that. But I knew Matt was special to him and near to his heart because he allowed him to be in his space.”

Connie says she could count on one hand the number of people her husband allowed at the Barrington house during those days. Among them were Singletary, business partner Mike Lanigan and Suhey, who visited four or five times weekly.

Payton showed Suhey his collection of firearms, blades and bows. They watched TV together, mostly sporting events and movies. They played the comedy “Major Payne” over and over — Payton did a spot-on imitation of Damon Wayans’ character. It wasn’t unusual for Suhey to doze off in front of the television. He once woke, found Payton staring at him and joked that he was looking at him a little too lovingly.

Payton’s meds made him sleepy and listless. During one difficult stretch, he stopped eating. Only Suhey could get him to eat and take more fluids. “He could move Walter in a way that sometimes we couldn’t,” Connie says.

Sometimes Suhey slept over in the bedroom belonging to Jarrett or his sister, Brittney. The kids had to find somewhere else to sleep. Whenever Suhey left, he woke Payton with a kiss on the forehead and told him he loved him. Payton always asked, “When are you coming back?”

As Payton’s eyes yellowed and his weight loss neared 100 pounds, he and his former teammate didn’t look back and reminisce much about football as most old players would.

They looked forward, discussing what would become of Payton’s business empire, his children and his wife.

They talked about his legacy.

They talked about his soul.

Suhey remembers the early afternoon phone call that came on Nov. 1, 25 years ago Friday. He had been expecting it for a while, but the news stunned him just the same. He drove to Payton’s house to be with the family.

Payton had named Suhey the executor of his estate and put him in charge of his name, image and likeness rights. Suhey was involved in founding the Walter Payton Liver Center at the University of Illinois Hospital and Walter Payton College Preparatory High School. According to Jarrett, Suhey continues to lord over all things sold under the Walter Payton name — and has never asked for anything in return.

“I had no clue about a lot of business dealings, so I was very thankful for Matt because I could trust him to be honest and true,” Connie says. “For me, it was a big deal.”

Suhey has advised Jarrett on investments, including his stakes in Flagship on the Fox sports bar, Jarrett Payton’s All-American Wheat Ale and Payton Premium Coffee.

Suhey’s support has been emotional as much as financial. Connie considers him a big brother; to Jarrett, he is a father figure. Suhey spoke to Jarrett about the sanctity of the vows he took when he married Trisha. When Jarrett’s son, Jaden, was born, Suhey calmed his nerves, assuring him parenthood would come naturally in time.

Jarrett texts Suhey photos of his children. Suhey has been to their birthday parties. Jarrett’s family vacationed with the Suheys at their Arizona home.

“He tells me every time I talk to him — every time,” Jarrett says. “‘Do you know how proud your father is of you?’”

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The anniversary of Payton’s death is always a difficult day for Suhey.

On a recent anniversary, the fullback found himself alone in an old church that was dark except for streams of sunlight beaming through stained glass. He lit a votive candle. Then another. Two candles became four, became 10, became 20 until each one was aflame. He stuffed $100 in the collection slot.

Then the fullback sat alone in silence thinking about the days he and the tailback ran together. And in the sacred, warm glow of candlelight, he prayed that one day they would run together again.

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos courtesy of the Chicago Bears)