By MONTE DUTTON

Lord, have mercy on the Presbyterian Blue Hose.

If not for bad luck, the baseball team would have no luck at all.

High Point just wrapped up the Big South regular-season championship by sweeping the Blue Hose 10-4, 8-5 and 15-5 on PC’s home field. Presbyterian has lost 11 of its last 12 games. If you want to know what happened, you’ll have to read the box scores. PC’s website lists nothing achieved by anyone wearing High Point purple, and the box scores don’t list the visitors’ first names.

Presbyterian’s version of public relations is to mention only the positive, even if there’s precious little there. Apparently they think honest coverage is competition for the ministry of information.

Elton Pollock’s team is not alone. In fact, the athletic department is staffed by fine men and women who do their best. Theirs, by and large, are thankless jobs.

To paraphrase Dan Fogelberg, they are “holding their own against impossible odds. Badly outnumbered and caught in a crossfire of devils and gods.”

Steve Englehart’s football team won its last four games to finish 6-6. It doesn’t have any players with an athletic scholarship. Nor do most of the teams it plays. It was PC’s best record since 2014, when it had scholarships.

Quinton Ferrell’s men’s basketball team has endured six consecutive losing seasons. He and his staff and, God knows, his players, keep trying.

As the school year takes its final athletic breaths, the combined won-lost record of PC’s men’s teams that have records (cross country and golf being exceptions) is 50-88-2. The women, though buoyed by teams in two sports where few NCAA Division I institutions field teams (women’s wrestling and acrobatics & tumbling), are an accumulative 66-94-5.

Coaching at PC is a less dangerous version of a Ukrainian general. God love them for their courage and valor. It’s amazing they can persevere.

Cally Gault, a great figure at both Presbyterian College and in Clinton, came along at a time when the Blue Hose were very close to dropping football. It was a rough time. His predecessor had committed suicide. He said publicly that if a football team wasn’t an important part of the educational experience, they ought to get rid of it.

In 1963, Presbyterian College found Coach Gault. It was a time for a man, and he was a man for the time. In a time of similar stress, in 2021, it found Kevin Kelley.

Times change. That’s what’s wrong with it at PC. Blue Hose used to have a fighting chance, not just the occasional miracle.

Being a part of the educational experience means giving the athletes a reasonable shot at success, not just a miracle.

Though attributed to him, Albert Einstein never actually said, ‘Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” Its earliest known use was in 1981 in a publication of Narcotics Anonymous. A mild form of addiction is the delusion of grandeur. It’s merely a slow death. The athletics department at PC is trying.

A more positive take on Presbyterian College’s athletics philosophy is one cited to a Confederate soldier at the Battle of Gettysburg: “We’ll fight them, sir, till hell freezes over, and then, sir, we will fight them on the ice.”

And … we know how that turned out.

For God’s sake, PC, give these young men and women that fighting chance. Gault’s oft-cited “Fighting Blue Hose Spirit” used to be real.

Insiders, people “in the know,” say, “I can assure you, nothing is going to change.” They’re not going to retreat to Division II. They’re not going to restore football scholarships.

Nothing is going to change until nothing is left.

The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, which I reviewed recently, can be found on Amazon, as is the case with many books that I actually wrote.

I just finished another non-fiction book, a brand-new one, on a far more familiar topic. My friend Mike Hembree has written Petty vs. Pearson: The Rivalry That Shaped NASCAR.

What can I do to get you to sample my fiction? How about a cheap sample of short stories, Longer Songs? The stories all originated in songs I’ve written. It’s been a few years since I published it.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is about a group of people who get themselves unwittingly entangled in a conspiracy of politicians, businessmen (I didn’t write business persons because the ones in the novel are all men), law-enforcement personnel and the intelligence community.

Two of my novels, Lightning in a Bottle and Cowboys Come Home, are available in audio versions.