Iconic photos of Walter Payton and Matt Suhey have been blessing and curse for local photographer

OK, I defy anybody to sit calmly and study the three-photo sequence of Walter Payton ‘‘pantsing’’ Matt Suhey in the spring of 1985 and not crack up.

I can’t.

And I’ve been looking at the photos off and on for days.

Payton’s got Suhey’s shorts by the wee tip of his finger in the first photo, like a kid launching a slingshot.

He’s more determined in the second photo, having brought both hands into play. And, good Lord, look at the devilish semi-grin he’s not bothering to hide. Payton, prankster eternal, is in his wheelhouse in the I-formation, going for the kill.

And — wait for it — here it is:

Photo by Jim Maentanis

No. 3 shows fullback Suhey’s shorts around his ankles as his Hall of Fame halfback/pal completes the mission.

This series never has been published in its entirety before, and we have photographer to thank for that courtesy today.

Honestly, folks, if you’ve been having a bad week or are feeling stressed out or put upon, this glimpse at nitwit, lowbrow humor as practiced by perhaps the most beloved yet tragically departed Chicago sports hero of all time is a pick-me-up supreme. And you can thank Maentanis, who was just a clueless, freelancing 21-year-old college kid back then, for the pleasure.

Think about it.

First of all, you can’t do this kind of thing in public anymore. The decency police or the players’ union or Mothers Against Bare Buttocks would be swarming with outrage and summons and perhaps probation for Payton as a first-time offender (even though he was a serial wisenheimer).

Plus, nobody would do this to anybody but a good friend. Payton and Suhey were best buds, a kind of unmixed chocolate-and-vanilla gridiron cupcake. Payton was the black kid from the Deep South by way of little Jackson State; Suhey was the white boy from Pennsylvania via Joe Paterno and mighty Penn State.

Payton was the dancing Bear; Suhey was the bowling ball clearing the path. Their affection for each other would become clearest when Payton was dying of liver cancer and Suhey was there to soothe his friend and run interference for him against the swarming media horde.

That friendship is subversively embodied in these shots. After all, Suhey is protecting his bare cheeks with one useless hand, remaining in his stance rather than turning around and belting the ruthless Payton. Life was fun and impertinent back then, and football, brutal game that it was, still had room for silliness. Maybe it wasn’t ever really so, but that’s how we can imagine it. That’s how it seemed. That’s how time passes, how life moves on, how the photos play out.

Indeed, frozen here like two bawdy comedic actors, Payton and Suhey represent something oddly humanizing and comforting about the vicious game.

Remember, this isn’t some run-of-the-mill halfback stretching a teammate’s elastic. It’s the greatest player in Bears history, one of the greatest in football history, the man whose name is emblazoned on the NFL’s Man of the Year Award, the trophy given annually to the player whose volunteer and charity work matches his excellence afield.

You also better get a chuckle out of this: Athletes actually wore jock straps back then. I don’t know if they even sell such things anymore. Well, yes, they do. With names such as ‘‘Midnight Pop,’’ ‘‘Cowboy’’ and ‘‘Massive Night Sparkle Bubblebutt.’’ Couldn’t make those up, people. They’re not, uh, sports jock straps, though.

Compression shorts are the undergarment deal in sports these days. So you know what pantsing your teammate would look like now? Replacing one pair of shorts with another.

As with any great photograph, there’s a story behind these.

Photo by Jim Maentanis

And this is all about Maentanis, a Glenview native who was a walk-on football player at Southern Illinois University, a tremendous fan of the Bears and home for spring break in March 1985. Unfortunately, his story as it relates to the imagery isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

As we sit at a suburban coffee shop and he lays out the details of the shoot of 34½ years ago and the history of his photography career, Maentanis tells the tale of how a nearly accidental moment of transcendence changed his life in ways he never could have expected. Now 56 and unemployed, Maentanis sometimes gets so bogged down in details leading up to and away from that football practice that he says things such as: ‘‘I’m sorry. If I’m off-track, just tell me and I’ll stop.’’

What he’s very clear about is how the Payton-Suhey photos came to pass.

The Bears were having a minicamp at their facility in Lake Forest, a beat-up grass field they shared with the Division III Lake Forest College Foresters (how times have changed!), and Maentanis took three of his buddies from now-closed Maine North High School — brothers Bobby, Billy and Walt

Cohen — with him to check things out. Why did the brothers come along?

‘‘The Bears!’’ Maentanis said.

Enough said.

He also took his camera — a Nikon F3 with a couple of lenses — because ‘‘my camera went everywhere with me.’’

Having studied photography for four years in high school and continuing with it at SIU, Maentanis was taking shots for the college newspaper, as well as stringing for the Southern Illinoisan, the 25,000-circulation newspaper in Carbondale. All his life, he had wanted to be one of two things: a pro football player or a professional photographer.

The football thing wasn’t going to work out. A sturdy 6-1 receiver with good hands who eventually won a scholarship, Maentanis nevertheless was so slow afoot that ‘‘the cheerleaders were faster than me,’’ he said.

Plus, his photo assignments for class conflicted constantly with afternoon practices. So photography it was.

On this day, however, he wasn’t on assignment for anyone. He was just a fan, looking for Payton, his hero.

‘‘We went into the practice, and the brothers stayed with spectators,’’ Maentanis said. ‘‘I went over to where the running backs were lined up.’’

There were no cops holding people back and no tickets needed. It was just a warm, sunny football day open to the public, years before social-media mayhem or the horrors of 9/11 and rampant serial shootings. The Bears were an open book.

As he was seeking out Payton, Maentanis fitted into his camera a 180 2.8-millimeter lens, a fixed, fast telephoto lens that could give him good depth of field and detail from yards away. He looked up, and Payton already had grabbed Suhey’s shorts and let them fly.

‘‘Oh, no,’’ he thought. ‘‘I missed a great shot!’’

But then Payton did it again. And again. For 10 or 15 minutes. He was motivated.

‘‘All the guys were laughing,’’ Maentanis recalled. ‘‘Suhey kept on yelling at Walter to stop, but he wasn’t mad. This was hilarious.’’

Maentanis stepped inside the rope that separated the sideline from the field and fired off some photos of the drill out in the center of the field. Ken Valdiserri, the Bears’ director of marketing and broadcasting, abruptly walked out and asked him what he was doing, how he thought he could waltz out onto the field. Maentanis told him whom he was and that he was doing some freelance work. It was all true, but it was somewhat beside the point, given he was also just a college kid on break ogling his heroes and doing what he had asked no one permission to do.

Valdiserri got Maentanis back on the sideline, and the practice ended not long after that. Valdiserri was speaking with Suhey about some other matters near midfield when Payton crept up and, crouching low, yanked down Suhey’s shorts once and for all. That’s the third photo in the series, the fait accompli. If it weren’t cropped just so, Valdiserri would be seen on the left border, amused like everyone else.

‘‘If this had all been on video, it would have been so funny,’’ Maentanis said. ‘‘They’d get in position, and Suhey would scoot up a few inches to get out of Walter’s grip. He was yelling, ‘Knock it off!’ The audio would have been great.

‘‘On one of the shots, I didn’t even have time to focus; I just fired. Another one, I had to back up a few steps to get it. But Payton kept doing it over and over again, messing around. Then Suhey was talking to Kenny, and I saw Payton sneaking up, and that was the end.’’

The weird thing about photography years ago was that it was all done on film, which the cameraman had to rewind himself, put into a tiny cylindrical container and send to a darkroom for development. Nobody knew what he had until the negatives came out and prints were made. The idea of digital images instantly viewable was crazy.

The suspense between shooting and the image garnered could be almost unbearable. Indeed, anything could ruin the undeveloped film — heat, cold, water, light, X-rays, a teething dog — and the film might be bad or exposed even before it was loaded into the camera. And the camera might not load the film at all. These were things photographers found out with depressing regularity.

Maentanis had no idea what he had captured, if anything, until he drove back to SIU and got his single roll of black-and-white film developed. What was there was pretty good, pretty funny. In fact, it was quite good and funny. He showed it to the editors at the Southern Illinoisan.

‘‘They all liked it, and they laughed,’’ Maentanis said.

But the photos never ran, not there or anywhere. The reason? Don’t laugh.

‘‘They said, ‘It’s too risqué,’ ’’ he said.

And so it went for many years. Maentanis made a few copies and gave them to pals, and he had Payton and Suhey sign some for him. But he didn’t monetize anything. He wasn’t an entrepreneur of any kind.

The Bears would win the Super Bowl 10 months after that minicamp, and names such as Ditka, McMahon, Singletary and The Fridge became household words. Payton

already was a legendary figure, but there was a lingering sadness to that Super Bowl XX victory, an annihilation of the Patriots that should have been pure joy.

Suhey scored the first touchdown in the Bears’ 46-10 rout. Quarterback Jim Mc-

Mahon scored two touchdowns. Defensive back Reggie Phillips scored on an interception return. Backup defensive tackle Henry Waechter recorded a safety. Even William ‘‘The Refrigerator’’ Perry scored.

But Payton did not. And for a proud and sensitive man with a warrior’s ferocity and a child’s heart, that was damaging. All of a sudden, that Payton-Suhey photo had turned into something different, a talisman from a more innocent time.

The defining quality, however, came some 14 years later, when Payton died of a devastating liver disease. Only 45, he was gone too soon, and everyone knew it. This month marks the 20th anniversary of Payton’s death, and it was only a couple of months

ago that the Bears unveiled the large bronze statue of Payton that stands in front of Soldier Field, not far from the new statue of Bears founder George Halas.

†††

It was three years after the Super Bowl victory or thereabouts that Maentanis’ dad, a former deputy sheriff, was working security at a charity auction. He called his son and told him he ought to donate one of his photos to the cause. Maentanis did, and the photo sold for $500.

‘‘That was it,’’ he said. ‘‘My mom said: ‘You got something there. Maybe you should think about doing something with it.’ But

licensing stuff and all that, it was difficult. I was freelancing in Florida at the time, and I wouldn’t get back to the Midwest, to a job in Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, until 1997.

“And then in early 1999, Walter announces he’s sick. And on that day, Feb. 2, my photo went out on the AP wire for the first time. And the next thing I know, it went crazy.

Everybody was calling about the photo. It was in newspapers across the country. People magazine called and bought it, and it ran in the Richard Gere ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ cover issue.’’

Maentanis had a deeply respectful love for Payton that he carries to this day. Much of it started when he was visiting a high school girlfriend who lived in Arlington Heights. They were sitting on her steps on a hot summer day when an African American man in a ripped T-shirt went running past.

‘‘Who’s the Charles Atlas bodybuilder guy?’’ Maentanis asked, marveling.

He couldn’t believe it when his girlfriend said it was Payton.

‘‘And he lives across the street,’’ Maentanis said. ‘‘Like, if this is 12 o’clock straight ahead, his house was at 10 o’clock. My jaw dropped. Then he slowed down and said, ‘Hi, Ellie!’ and he came by and talked to her and asked if I wanted to play basketball. I freaked.’’

So they played hoops a number of times that summer on Payton’s driveway basket, with Payton’s Lamborghini moved safely out of the way. The 5-10 Payton sometimes was able to dunk the ball, which amazed Maentanis. Quite often, 4-year-old Jarrett Payton would watch the action.

‘‘A couple of times, [Payton’s wife] Connie would bring us lemonade,’’ Maentanis said. ‘‘And I remember one time holding Jarrett on my lap. I’m saying to myself, ‘I’m holding Walter Payton’s son!’ ’’

On the day of the minicamp photograph, Maentanis wanted to tell Payton who he was, that they were old hoops buds, but he never got the chance. After Payton’s death, he wanted to honor Payton by using the photo or photos to raise organ-donor awareness, something Payton himself had promoted passionately in his final year, as he waited for a liver transplant that might extend his life.

The transplant never happened, but Maentanis arranged a deal with the secretary of state’s office to give away free copies of the photo at charity events to anyone who signed up for or showed interest in signing up for organ-donor status.

‘‘You know how powerful Walter’s message was?’’ Maentanis said. ‘‘Illinois went from being 47th in the country — basically last — in people who signed up to be organ donors to first in only a few months. I set up tables and gave the photos away for free. I couldn’t make people pay or demand they sign the donor cards, but I did get thousands of people to sign their names, and then I’d send them to the secretary of state.’’

The charity was nice, but it didn’t help Maentanis’ financial prospects. Photography is a dying business. Or, rather, it’s an

exponentially expanding business — non-profit, for sure — because every human out there with a modern phone is a photographer for free.

Just as the internet is free, so are the

images people can download — both legally and illegally. Maentanis has found his photos being used in restaurants, in videos, on CDs, in documentaries, on posters, at memorabilia conventions, just about any way and everywhere football fans might want to see them. He can sue — and he has — but it’s exhausting, and the damages are small.

There is a legal thing called ‘‘fair usage,’’ wherein a filmmaker or documentarian can use almost any image without paying for it, provided there is a defensible educational aspect to the work and there is no real profit being made. It is a vague and complex law with obvious benefits for the public, in general, but it can be a nightmare for a starving artist or creative individual to battle against.

To some extent, Maentanis has lost out on what he captured with his camera because he chose certain non-mercenary pursuits over moneymaking things. For example, he cared for his mother for a half-dozen years until she died a year ago, making a full-time job impossible.

He still has a letter from April 8, 1991, from late sportswriter and sportscaster Tim Weigel, who apologized for being unable to transfer a tape to VHS for Maentanis of Channel 7 reporter Brad Palmer and Payton holding up one of Maentanis’ photos during a broadcast.

‘‘Sorry it didn’t work out, but I still have the picture framed and on my desk here at Channel 7,’’ Weigel wrote. ‘‘Whenever I look at it, I think of you.’’

That means something, doesn’t it? Even if Weigel himself died far too young of a brain tumor in 2001, the thought was there.

Nothing is ever quite what it seems, anyway. Jeff Pearlman’s 2011 biography of Payton, ‘‘Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton,’’ showed that the man was anything but the simple, one-dimensional, childish nice guy and prankster he often was made out to be.

Pearlman described Payton as having drug addictions for his football pains and being buffeted by suicidal thoughts, with longtime agent Bud Holmes stating: ‘‘Walter would call me all the time saying he was about to kill himself. He was tired. He was angry. Nobody loved him. He wanted to be dead.’’

I know Pearlman and respect him, and I remember well when he came to Chicago on the book tour and told me he was amazed that he was cast as the bad guy by locals for bearing bad news, that his book was

reviled, that simply by telling the truth he was dismissed and disparaged for casting doubt upon a civic icon. I told him he didn’t know how important an untarnished Payton was to the populace here, that it almost defied explanation. I couldn’t explain it myself — and this coming from a fellow who claims to champion the truth — but I felt it all the same. A flawed football star gave us everything he had, and we took it. And when that star was demeaned, so were we.

This drifts into the esoteric, the philosophical. And parts of it all haunt Maentanis to this day. There are these lighthearted photos from many years ago that somehow got away from him and became almost a curse. Which is so wrong, so sad.

‘‘If you’re not marketing- or business- savvy, everybody steals from you,’’ he said. ‘‘In a way, the photos have been a nightmare of my life. But complaining won’t do me any good. I’m grateful I got the thousands of organ donors, that it makes people happy. But otherwise . . . ’’

He pauses here. So much time has gone by. So many things have changed. Can a smile fade to gray? Can a cheerful image mutate the way the rest of life so often does? Is a photo ever really that important?

‘‘Otherwise,’’ Maentanis said, ‘‘I wish I never hit the shutter.’’