Country superstar Tim McGraw performed at the iconic Field of Dreams baseball diamond on Saturday, August 30, in Dyersville, Iowa, which was the first concert ever held at the historic movie location — but it was special for McGraw for a deeply personal reason.
The concert took place on what would have been his dad Tug McGraw’s 81st birthday, he revealed in an Instagram post about the night.
“Would’ve been my dad’s 81st birthday. I’m gonna be looking at the cornfield out there and seeing if Tug and Hank walk out and say hello tonight.” — Tim McGraw
Tim McGraw’s Instagram video
“Would’ve been my dad’s 81st birthday. I’m gonna be looking at the cornfield out there and seeing if Tug and Hank walk out and say hello tonight,” said McGraw on the video. In the caption, he added, “Iowa! You guys brought it last night! First ever concert @thefieldofdreamsmoviesite and on Tug’s birthday too! Hard to top that!!!”
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In the video, he also shares footage of himself leading the crowd in singing happy birthday to his father, who died in 2004 at the age of just 59. Also, the “Hank” he mentions in the video is his Uncle Hank, aka Henry Thomas McGraw, the older brother of Tim’s father Tug. Hank was also a baseball player in the 1960s.
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Hank just passed away in July 2024, with Tim McGraw writing on Instagram at the time, “This weekend we lost the patriarch of the McGraw family. Our beloved ‘Uncle Hank.’ He was just an incredible man. He had a way of lighting up any room he walked into without trying.”
Tim McGraw came to know his father later in life — his mother Betty D’Agostino met Tug McGraw when he was a minor league baseball player in Florida. When she found out she was pregnant, she was sent to live with relatives in Louisiana, which is where Tim McGraw was born and raised. He didn’t know Tug was his father until he was 11, and the two didn’t form a relationship until Tim was an adult, according to a 2021 interview McGraw did with Esquire.
But after they met, the two grew close, and when the elder McGraw got sick with a brain tumor, he actually lived out his final months at his son Tim’s home with wife Faith Hill in Tennessee. The former major league pitcher died in early 2004, just months before McGraw’s huge hit “Live Like You Were Dying” was released, which is about embracing life when faced with a terminal illness and even talks about a father-son bond with the lines “I was finally the husband that most the time I wasn’t/ And I became a friend a friend would like to have/ And all of a sudden goin’ fishin’ wasn’t such an imposition/ And I went three times that year I lost my dad.”
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The video for “Live Like You Were Dying” ends with a clip of Tug throwing the final strike for the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies’ World Series win. In a 2021 interview with Matthew McConaughey on McGraw’s podcast, McGraw admitted that recording that song was very special to him.
“[‘Live Like You Were Dying’] was sent to me in the middle of my father’s diagnosis of glioblastoma brain cancer and going through all of his treatments,” said McGraw on the podcast. “He stayed at my cabin out at the farm, and we were spending a lot of nights out there with my uncle and my brother, just hanging out, listening to music and watching football games. We spent a couple of weeks there before he passed away in the bedroom there in the cabin.”
He added, “My Uncle Hank was there, my dad’s older brother, and we had been recording all day and about three o’clock in the morning, I looked around at the band. I said, ‘I think it’s time to do this song.’ We spent the next three hours up until sunup recording this song, and my uncle collapsed on a couch crying every time we did a pass of it. That’s got to be one of the most special memories I have of making any music anywhere.”
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The storied Field of Dreams baseball field is where actor Kevin Costner, director Phil Alden Robinson and the rest of the crew built a real full-size baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield for the 1989 film. One of the key plots in the film is Costner’s character Ray Kinsella dealing with the strained relationship he had with his late father, John (Dwier Brown). Eventually, at the end of the film, Ray gets to “have a catch” with the young version of his father, who appeared there to play baseball.
While this is the first concert held at the Field of Dreams site, there are “ghost” baseball players who play for tourists throughout the summer, plus Major League Baseball has started hosting games there. The first two games were held on the second Thursday of August in 2021 and 2022; on August 24, MLB announced the return of the Field of Dreams game for 2026, which will be held between the Phillies and the Minnesota Twins in August 2026.
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