Life imitates baseball for McGraw

Sporting News, The, June 9, 2003 by Dave Kindred

On March 12 came word that Tug McGraw would have surgery for a malignant brain tumor. Then, silence. No doctors briefing the media, no prognosis delivered. No visitors to McGraw. Not a word. It was the kind of oppressive silence that suggests a death watch, which, we now know, it was.

While working as a spring training pitching instructor for the Phillies, he'd behaved oddly. He'd mistaken a Monday for Sunday. He'd wandered around his kitchen, thinking it to be a bathroom. A friend drove him to a nearby hospital where a doctor told film the confusions were the result of a brain tumor.

"They told me I had three weeks to live," McGraw said on a day almost 11 weeks later.

He's 58 years old. In his time as a star relief pitcher for the Mets and Phillies, he had long, blond hair leaping from beneath his cap. Chemotherapy and radiation have left him bald. Where neurosurgeons opened the top of his skull for six hours of surgery, a scar traces a circle of red reaching to his forehead, the scar visible when he removes his cap now, the cap bearing the legend, "Ya Gotta Believe!"

He said those words 30 years ago.

He needs them now.

He said them in 1973 when maybe only he believed the Mets could get to the World Series. Soon enough, hearing McGraw say it again and again, seeing him do his magic in the ninth, the Mets themselves came to believe in belief.

He wore the "Ya Gotta Believe!" cap the other day when he met reporters in Philadelphia before a game with the Mets. Perfect: the Phillies and Mets, teams for which he was a closer in three World Series.

Tug McGraw once said, "Some days you tame the tiger. And some days the tiger has you for lunch," his way of explaining a reliever's life on the edge, working when the game is there to be won or lost.

The man could talk funny talk. Why drive a 1954 Buick? "I like it because it plays old music."

He answered every question. Did he prefer real grass or AstroTurf? "I don't know, I've never smoked AstroTurf." How'd he meet his wife? "I met my wife in a New York bar. We had a lot in common. We were both from California and were both drunk?"

How would he budget a raise? "Ninety percent I'll spend on good times, women and Irish whiskey. The other 10 percent I'll probably waste."

Pete Rose? "If anybody plays harder than Pete Rose, he's gotta be an outpatient?"

After the Phillies won the 1980 National League championship in the 10th inning of an 8-7 game filled with sensational plays, he said, "It was like riding through an art gallery on a motorcycle?"

Good thing, because had the Phillies lost they'd have returned to the City of Brotherly Love to an unlovely reception: "A machine-gun pillbox set up at the airport."

When the Phillies won that 1980 World Series, McGraw said, "This is the end of an incredible journey. I get the feeling that W.C. Fields is out of his grave tonight celebrating with us. I gotta believe that even old Ben Franklin is turning over in his grave."

In 19 major league seasons, McGraw had a 96-92 record with a 3.13 earned-run average and 180 saves. Good stuff, and his old Mets teammate, Tom Seaver, meant it as a wry compliment when he said back then, "Tug McGraw has about 48 cards in his deck."

On a day in Philadelphia when he was eight weeks past a notice of his impending death, Philadelphia reporters thought McGraw spoke a beat more slowly than he once did. They also thought he spoke the same language as always, as when someone asked the specific type of cancer in his brain.

"Before he could reply," Paul Hagen wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News, "his handlers jumped in, saying no further information would be released. Tug offered a lopsided grin. 'It was definitely a ball-buster', he said."

On a trip to the Phillies clubhouse, McGraw said, several players hugged him. "Even a few kisses," he said. "Some of the switch hitters, I guess?"

He'd come to Philadelphia to open a "Ya Gotta Believe in Baseball" campaign designed to reinvigorate the game he loves. Information about the campaign and the cancer clinic that saved his life is on his website, TugMcGraw.com.

McGraw earned a spot in Philadelphia's heart in 1980. The Phillies won that World Series with victories in Games 5 and 6. Both times the Royals loaded the bases in the ninth. Both times McGraw ended the game with a strikeout.

Now he's on the edge again, only this time the edge of life. It's eight weeks past "the three-week thing," as he calls it. It's a month past twice-a-day, five-times-a-week chemotherapy. But examinations show something on the left side of McGraw's brain, maybe cancer, maybe scar tissue. So he has chemotherapy one week a month.

"I'm right in the middle of it," he said. "My prognosis is very good. I'm not fearful. I have confidence."

The Phillies will play this season with a jersey hanging in their dugout. It's No. 45, Tug McGraw's.

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com