The now 58-year-old, who grew up playing baseball, was elated to discover that his father was MLB royalty and pleaded with his mother to take him to a game,“ [I] begged my mom to take me back to see the Phillies play Houston, and she borrowed a car and we drove to Houston. He was playing at the Astrodome, and he had left tickets for us. We walk in and they’re warming up and he’s down on the field…I started yelling at him, and then he wouldn’t look at me. I spent 30 minutes trying to get his attention, and he wouldn’t look at me. So I went and sat back down, and then I never saw him again til I was 18.”
When the “Don’t Take the Girl” singer graduated from high school in 1985, he received a baseball scholarship to Northeastern Louisiana University. However, his mother knew the scholarship wouldn’t fully cover his tuition, so she contacted Tug for financial assistance. During this time, the father and son first met. Tug later recalled their initial meeting, “He [Tim] looked at me and he said, ‘Hey, I just wanna know if I could call you dad?‘ He said he just wanted to know that he could call me Dad. I said, ‘Yeah, I’m your father.’ I mean, when you hear that, it brings everything to a conclusion.”
After the reconciliation, Tim, who had gone by the last name “Smith” his entire life, changed his last name to McGraw, and he and Tug maintained a close relationship until Tug passed away from a brain tumor in 2004. In a 2021 interview with Esquire, the 1883 actor revealed his response when people ask how he overlooked his father’s treatment of him and his family while he was growing up: “People ask me, ‘How could you have a relationship with your father? You were growing up in nothing. He was a millionaire baseball player. He knew you were there, and he didn’t do anything.’ But when I found out Tug McGraw was my dad, it gave me something in my little town in Louisiana, something that I would have never reached for. How could I ever be angry?”
