Here it is, just for comparison:
http://archive.parade.com/2004/0822/0822_tim_mcgraw.html ‘It’s All Family Now’
By Ben Fong-Torres
Published: August 22, 2004
When Tim McGraw sings his No. 1 country hit, “Live Like You Were Dying,” with its simple message—live for today—his fans get caught up in the emotion. They know he’s singing about—and to—one of his fathers.
Frank “Tug” McGraw—the colorful baseball pitcher known for his rallying cry, “You gotta believe!” when he was with the 1973 New York Mets—died in January of brain cancer at the age of 59.
Tug and Tim were extraordinarily close at the end, especially considering that, until Tim was 11, he didn’t know who his real father was.
Tim McGraw—who has sold 30 million albums, with 23 No. 1 country music hits in 10 years—grew up in Start, a tiny Louisiana town. In his first decade of life, he was Tim Smith, son of Horace Smith, a part-time truck driver, and Betty Trimble, a truck-stop waitress. Betty married Horace in 1968, a year after Tim was born. They went on to have two daughters of their own.
Living in near-poverty, the family moved constantly. “It was not a stable environment,” McGraw says. “Horace had problems with alcohol, and he could be abusive to Mom and to us. There were times when we had to get out of there, or something bad was gonna happen.”
The Smiths divorced in 1977, when Tim was 10. Late the following year, he was looking through a closet, hoping for a sneak preview of Christmas gifts, when he found a shoebox containing his birth certificate. He noticed that the father’s original last name, McGraw, had been replaced with Smith. The father’s occupation: pro baseball player.
Tim struggled to form a bond with his reluctant father.
Tim, a Little Leaguer and the proud owner of four baseball cards—one featuring Tug McGraw—was shocked. When he confronted his mother, she explained that she had met Tug in 1966 in Jacksonville, Fla., when he pitched for a minor league team. They had a summer romance, and Tim was conceived.
Her secret revealed, Betty contacted Tug McGraw, then a relief pitcher with the Philadelphia Phillies, and arranged a 1979 meeting at the ballpark in Houston when the Phillies came to town. After a brief and awkward meeting, Tug expressed doubts that the 11-year-old boy was his.
“I never saw him again until I was 18,” says Tim, though he wrote letters to McGraw throughout his teens. None of them was answered.
When Tim was finishing high school—where he played baseball, football and basketball—he insisted on seeing Tug again. He wanted one final meeting. It took place in a hotel lobby in Houston. As soon as Tug saw the strapping young man, he knew that he was Tim’s father.
In time, they would forge a solid bond. Still, Tim admits, “I don’t know that, with those early years missing, you could put it up there with any father-and-son relationship.” Even after the McGraws had played baseball together at old-timers’ games, Tim would say that he considered Horace Smith his father. “He was there during the time I was growing up.” Their relationship today, he says, “is sometimes good, sometimes bad.”
* * * * *
I hope you now have the opportunity to spend many good years together.
God bless,
Bruce
