For Steve Tate and Reno Mahe, tragedy forged a powerful bond between a Ute and a Cougar

For several days last November, Steve Tate did little else but watch his son die. The hospital room felt cold to him, and the outside world dim. He thinks he stayed in that room for five straight days before he decided to leave. And he doesn’t remember why he went downstairs, only how it changed him forever.

In the lobby of Primary Children’s Hospital, Tate, the former University of Utah safety, spotted a familiar face. Reno Mahe, the new running backs coach at Brigham Young University, was surrounded by family, eating dinner and waiting for their own heartbreaking news.

The two men, rivals once, hugged and talked for a few minutes.

“It was that moment,” Tate said this week, “that changed my perspective on everything.”

In the days that followed that encounter in the lobby, Hayes Tate, 20 months old, a fighter his whole brief life, would die. So would Elsie Mahe, the mischievous and smiling 3-year-old who loved to run barefoot and dump glitter on her hair.

And two grieving families would find hope in each other.

There always has been a mix of respect and rivalry in Tate’s and Mahe’s relationship. Tate remembers as a ninth-grader seeing Mahe at a movie theater a week before Skyline and Brighton played for a state title. He told him he enjoyed watching him play, though he didn’t care to see Mahe do well against his Eagles.

So in the early hours of a sleepless morning after Hayes’ cancer had returned, Steve Tate found some comfort in a simple act. Mahe had shared a message he had posted on Twitter.

“Hey, how cool is that?” Tate recalls thinking. “This former rival is now supporting me and my family.”

Tate started another grueling day. When next he looked at his phone some hours later, he learned that Mahe’s daughter was being flown to the hospital. A window blind cord had gotten tangled around Elsie Mahe’s neck, and the little girl was unresponsive. Her family members waited at the hospital for nearly a week as hope turned into hopelessness.

Their grief might have been harder to process if not for the support they found in a new friendship.

“It helps to be able to have a bond with a family like that, that’s been through what you’ve been through,” Mahe said. “They understand, and now you’re looking out for each other.”

This wasn’t always the case for Tate and Mahe.

Not on the football field at least.

“You can ask any BYU fan,” said Tate, who played at Utah in 2005 and 2006, “I wasn’t the most beloved Utah player.”

The Utes safety felt a fraternity with his rivals in blue and white, but he liked to jaw and enjoyed the passion the game evoked. The loss of his son and his friendship with the Mahes have given him a new perspective.

“My view on the rivalry, my view on sports in general, has changed,” Tate said. “Man, it’s great, but it’s a game. I’m competitive, but I realize it’s meaningless. At the end of the day, there’s just so much more in this world that’s going on that’s so much bigger than that.”

Mahe agrees.

“You realize how insignificant certain things are,” he said. “I say that with respect. This is a job. It’s my job and it’s a job I love to do, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s entertainment.”

Mahe, a former star at BYU, felt kinship with his Ute rivals even as a player. He remembers making prank phone calls to his friends on the other team or ordering toilet paper to be sent up to their rooms the night before the big game.

“But it kind of turned ugly after [late BYU coach LaVell Edwards] and after [former Utah coach Ron McBride] left,” Mahe said. “They had a great friendship. We were friends with guys on that team. … Then it kind of got bitter. It’s gotten a little nasty.”

Mahe believes the friendship between current Utah and BYU coaches, Kyle Whittingham and Kalani Sitake, has helped restore some civility to the rivalry game that will be played Saturday night in Provo.

For Tate and Mahe, the game is secondary to friendship now.

“We have nothing but love for each other,” Mahe said.

Hayes Tate’s heartbeat was so faint in the womb that doctors told Steve and Savanna Tate to expect only two of their triplets to be born. But Hayes was tough, his father said, with the face of an angel and the spirit of a fighter. He was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer less than a year into his life. He seldom cried.

He never met Elsie Mahe, who sometimes threw eggs on the kitchen floor pretending she was cooking just like her mom, Sunny.

“I’m not sure it was coincidental that our families connected,” Tate said. “Maybe we don’t know why now, but it was enough to feel that they needed to be a part of our lives and we needed to be a part of theirs.”

In the lobby of a hospital last fall, Steve Tate embraced with Reno Mahe then went back upstairs to his wife and young son.

“It was touch and go that night,” Tate recalled. “And for the first time it dawned on me how lucky I was to have Hayes, rather than how bad my circumstance was. My entire perspective and attitude changed. Although I only had him in my life for 20 months, it was the best 20 months of my life. And I immediately thought of the alternative. What if he hadn’t come into my life?”

The Tates and Mahes don’t see each other as often now as they would like. Their young, large families are both busy with work and life.

“But when we do, it’s impactful,” Tate said.

They met up at a church fireside last summer. And after the Mahes’ Miracles From Elsie Foundation fundraiser in July, Tate ended up with a Cougar football helmet he joked he would make his children wear as punishment. But these days, Tate finds himself rooting for BYU on occasion, like when he reached out to his friend before the Cougars’ bowl game last year. After all, both the Utes and Cougars wore the same stickers, to honor the lives of Hayes and Elsie, on their helmets in their postseason games.

“And we both won,” Mahe said. “How cool is that?”

Tate thanks Mahe for helping him turn tragedy into something positive in his life. For Mahe, looking at the Tates is like looking into a mirror.

“You come out here and you go through some hard days in life and you lean on that,” he said. “You lean on those examples, you lean on their experiences.”

Tate looks back and sees the same thing now, knowing that the lives of two former rivals will forever be intertwined.

“I look at my son and Reno’s kids and think they’ll probably play football against each other,” he said. “But they’ll have this in common. I think they’ll be seeing lots of each other throughout the years. We’ll have that support forever.”