By MONTE DUTTON

Gee whiz. At breakfast, I was lost in thought over the impending departure of Reclusive Rob.

I mean, I don’t want to be too harsh. Who am I kidding? Yes, I do. Tonight I will ask forgiveness for my feelings about Rob Acunto, whom I barely knew. I won’t try to organize a pep rally to send him off to Fresno State. Nor will I don a kilt, take up the bagpipes or skip off down a road of yellow bricks in search of the Emerald City.

Not a pretty picture.

I suppose some here knew him. I don’t think we’ve spoken in the past year. We may have nodded. The first time I encountered him, he made a deal to buy a small ad on my website and reneged, him and Simon Whitaker, by ignoring all subsequent communications over such requests, such as “what would you like your ad to look like?”

In fairness, Acunto was supportive of Presbyterian College’s powerhouse sports, acrobatics & tumbling (sometimes referred to as “acrotumbling” as if it weren’t nonsensical) and women’s wrestling. In fact, a spiffy new gym is being built where basketball fans used to park.

Meanwhile, since Acunto somehow managed to fire head football coach Tommy Spangler following PC’s only winning season in the past eight, the non-scholarship team has gone 3-19, with most of the losses occurring at the hands of other teams blissfully free of scholarship assistance.

Men’s basketball has lost its last 18 games.

Men’s tennis won the Big South this year, so there’s that. The athletics program as a whole improved to next-to-last overall in the conference this year after being last in 2021-22, leaving some to ask, “Just how bad has Winthrop gotten?”

I hope the iron curtain that descended across Presbyterian College under Acunto’s supervision will be removed in a joyous summer of love, but I don’t know. The school hired a new president without holding so much as a media conference, just a video and a release with the image just so.

Trying to write about PC is like breaching the Maginot Line, or the Siegfried Line, or, at best, a line in the sand, which allegedly happened at the Alamo. The sports publicity office is officially named “strategic communications” perhaps because the term “propaganda ministry” has gone out of fashion. I’m confident Acunto had a hands-on role in this doctrine of paranoia.

I have gotten my share of dark humor out of PC releases, such as the one following a 72-0 loss to Campbell in which no individual mention of any Camel player was included. Mel Brooks could have written it: After falling behind 21-0 in the first quarter, the Blue Hose mounted a seven-play, 62-yard drive before running out of downs. Then the Camels posted three more touchdowns in the second quarter.

Then was there the aforementioned “acrotumbling” team, which was 0-6 (finishing 0-7) with the release still touting the Blue Hose as ranked 14^th in the nation. Just how many schools are there that tumble acrobatically? Answer: Eight in NCAA Division I, 35 in Division II, 10 in Division III and one in the NAIA.

Thirty-nine NCAA schools have women’s wrestling teams.

Under Acunto’s direction, it wasn’t a matter of editing PC releases. It was nearly a matter of writing from scratch.

Now I dream of a Presbyterian College that is a butterfly, “and butterflies are free to fly.” Forgive me for taking Elton John and Bernie Taupin wildly out of context.

Acunto headed the athletics department for four years. According to Fresno State’s release, he will be a deputy AD in charge of internal relations, “including but not limited to compliance, academic services, human resources and personnel, and sports administration.”

I dream of a Presbyterian College where someone south of Woodruff can hear the football and basketball games on the radio. Ryan Clary has moved on to USC Upstate. Maybe he’ll continue to broadcast PC football as the Spartans don’t have it. (I tried to find out.) That way what local fans still exist could possibly know what he sounds like, that is, if they drive to Woodruff.

He was the least enthusiastic, communicative, gregarious and friendly athletics director I have ever known. In fact, he is the only AD I’ve ever known who wasn’t.

Presbyterian College, I think, should do much better in the coming school year in football, women’s basketball and baseball, at least. A change at the top might benefit other sports. It couldn’t hurt.

As Roger Miller wrote and Waylon Jennings sang, Acunto has “been a long time leaving but he’ll be a long time gone.”

Elsewhere …

Thornwell Charter School is playing football this fall under the direction of head coach Charlie Washington. The Saints have eight games, four at home.

They are: Aug. 25, at Calhoun Falls Charter; 8, at McCormick; 15, Clear Dot Charter (of Columbia); 22, Great Falls; 29, at Greenville Hurricanes; Oct. 6, at Anderson Christian; 20, American Leadership Academy (of Lexington); 27, Ware Shoals.

The home games are at 7:30 p.m., not 7 as with the county’s other schools.

Question: How can there be such a thing as a clear dot?

The Saints are to scrimmage West-Oak and Whitmire at home on Tuesday at 6, then play in a Chester jamboree against Lewisville on the following Friday night. They are unaligned in this build-up year but are to be assigned a region, undoubtedly Class A, when the S.C. High School league realigns next year.

Lewisville, which they scrimmage, and Great Falls, which they play, are rated in the top 10 Class A teams in the state via preseason rankings. On the other hand, I have never heard of two of the opponents … and I am conversant in SCISA.

Quite possibly, it will be a season of ups and downs.

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Support local music by attending — and participating in — the Open Mic I’m hosting at Fiesta Grande on Wednesday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m. Sign-up is at 6:45. Just bring your guitar, or whatever, and friends to cheer you on.