America at Large: 'Didja hear? Tim McGraw's father died!" Frank Edwin McGraw Jr passed away at 59 on Monday, a day before I got to Nashville, but the news was still reverberating up and down Music Row on Tuesday night, writes George Kimball.

The idiosyncratic left-hander had pitched for 19 years in the Major Leagues and appeared in 824 games, but in a country saloon on Nashville's Broadway I overheard a conversation in which the deceased was described as "You know, Faith Hill's father-in-law!" It was an irony no one would have appreciated more than Frank "Tug" McGraw himself.

His witticisms could fill, and do, the sporting version of Bartlett's, but what will doubtless be etched on his tombstone was the rallying cry - "You Gotta Believe!" - he coined for the New York Mets team he led to an improbable National League pennant in 1973.

In 1975 he signed a contract for what was then a record salary for relief pitchers - $75,000. Asked what he might do with such a staggering sum, McGraw replied: "Ninety per cent I'll spend on good times, women, and Irish whiskey. The other 10 per cent I'll probably waste."

Three decades ago the late New York Times columnist Red Smith described McGraw as "a beautiful guy, a sensitive, emotional, demonstrative, genuine, outgoing, affectionate, exuberant, sad and sometimes irresponsible human being."

When he was asked to describe the difference between grass and artificial turf, McGraw replied: "I wouldn't know. I've never smoked AstroTurf." His first meeting with the lady who would become his wife took place in a New York bar. "We had a lot in common," he recalled. "We were both from California and we were both drunk."

An undersized pitcher who lacked blazing speed, McGraw relied on guile to become one of the premier relievers of his day in a career nearly evenly divided between the Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies, both of whom he pitched to World Series titles.

He described his three varieties of fastballs, none of which was particularly fast, as the Peggy Lee, the Cutty Sark, and the John Jameson. Of the first, he explained, "I take something off it, and the hitter says, 'Is That All There Is?' " The Cutty Sark was so named because it sailed. And the Jameson? "Straight. Like Irish whiskey should be."

But the bread and butter of his arsenal was a deftly thrown screwball, a pitch which broke in on right-handed batters. Screwball, in fact, became the title of McGraw's autobiography, which many felt was appropriate because it described the man as well as his speciality. McGraw disagreed.

"They only call you a screwball till you make a pile of money," he explained. "Then they begin to describe you as 'eccentric'."

"Tug McGraw was one of the great characters of the game," Tom Seaver, a Mets team-mate and Baseball Hall of Famer, recalled this week. "He just had a joy for life and living. But what people sometimes overlook, because he was always happy go-lucky, was what kind of competitor he was on the mound. No one competed with more intensity than he did."

McGraw was 9-3 and saved 12 games for the 1969 Miracle Mets, but won his first World Series ring without ever getting into a game in the Fall Classic as his team blew away the favoured Baltimore Orioles, four games to one.

Four years later, with the help of his "You Gotta Believe" mantra, he rallied the Mets from dead last place to the World Series, where they came up one game short against the Oakland As.

He was traded to the Phillies after the following season (the Mets were concerned that a torn shoulder muscle would limit his career), and spent his last 10 years pitching for Philadelphia teams which reached the post-season six times in that span.

The crowning moment of his career, no doubt, came in the final game of the 1980 Series. Nearly 25 years later the emotionally-charged scene remains etched in memory: with the bases loaded and a veritable cavalry troop of mounted policeman ringing the field to protect the players from overzealous fans, McGraw sneaked a Peggy Lee fastball past Kansas City batter Willie Wilson for the final out and thrust his arms toward heaven, maintaining the pose until he was buried by a pig-pile of delirious team-mates.

I was at the Yankees spring training camp in Tampa last March when word came down from Clearwater that Tug had undergone emergency surgery for a malignant brain tumour. Then, last September, at a ceremony commemorating the closing of the Vet, McGraw, bloated and bald from cancer treatments, re-enacted that 1980 pitch to Wilson and its immediate aftermath. There wasn't a dry eye in the joint. He had two children with his wife, but the offspring with whom he spent his later years was a son he didn't know until the boy was 11 years old.

The youngster, who was living with his mother and stepfather, discovered a birth certificate revealing that his biological father was none other than his childhood hero, Tug McGraw. After making contact, the two became close, and the son went on to become, arguably, even more famous than his father.

Several years ago we were participating in a charity golf tournament in Florida on the eve of the Country Music Awards. A song written by my sister had been nominated for Song of the Year and the competition included one by Tim McGraw. Ever the proud papa, Tug wanted to bet on the outcome. (I'd have won.) When Tug announced his retirement from baseball in 1985, by the way, he did it on St Valentine's Day.

"Maybe it's appropriate," he said. "I've had a love affair with baseball. The game stole my heart - and I was never a jilted suitor."