A Devastating Tragedy Inspired One of Tim McGraw’s Biggest Hits

In 2001, Tim McGraw had a No. 1 single with “Grown Men Don’t Cry”. On his Set This Circus Down record, “Grown Men Don’t Cry” is written by Steve Seskin and Tom Douglas.

“Grown Men Don’t Cry” says, “Keep having this dream about my old man / I’m 10 years old, and he’s holding my hand / We’re talking on the front porch watching the sun go down / But it was just a dream / He was a slave to his job and he couldn’t be around / So many things I wanna say to him / But I just placed a rose on his grave, and I talk to the wind / And I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry / I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Seskin later reveals “Grown Men Don’t Cry” is partially based on a heartbreaking true story.

“My dad and I had a really tough time,” Seskin tells The Tennessean. “When I moved at 21 to California from New York, we didn’t talk for almost three years. And then, we were going to have that talk, that ‘let’s mend fences’ talk. And I got a call instead that he was gone, from a heart attack.

“The lines, ‘I put a rose on his grave, and I talked to the wind,’ actually happened to me,” he continues. “I stood by my father’s grave in Queens, New York, and had the mend fences talk that we had never had in real life. So that was the verse that killed me.”

Although McGraw didn’t write “Grown Men Don’t Cry”, he felt a personal connection to the song. McGraw also was estranged from his biological father, Tug McGraw, for many years. Fortunately, they later reconciled and were close when the former professional baseball player passed away in 2004.

“It was the second verse that he certainly related to, the first and the last line,” Seskin says.

The Other Inspiration Behind Tim McGraw’s “Grown Men Don’t Cry”

Seskin’s loss inspired part of “Grown Men Don’t Cry”. But Douglas also had his own painful memory, which is what began the idea of “Grown Men Don’t Cry”. Douglas recalls going to a store to buy donuts to take to his son’s third-grade class. As he was leaving, he saw a woman, obviously impoverished, weeping on a pay phone, with her little boy nearby.

“In a moment I thought, ‘I could give ’em 10 bucks,’” Douglas remembers thinking. “‘I could tell them where a Union Mission is. Or I could just drive off in my black, new Chevy Suburban.’ And that’s what I did. I did nothing, and I was so ashamed that I let something kind of insignificant get in the way of a real-life experience.”

Douglas told the story to Seskin, which is what began “Grown Men Don’t Cry”. Seskin later wrote the second verse almost entirely by himself.

Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

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