Rich Transit Gloria Clunedi: The Disappearance of @richcluneshow

by J.R.

byebyerich“Smart lad to slip betimes away,
From field where glory does not stay.” — “To An Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman

“OK.”

Like a meteor or a rainbow, like Housman’s garland, briefer than a girl’s — some things are too beautiful to live in this world.

Imagine a painted bunting landing in a gray, abandoned wasteland. So out of place it would be — so in danger from the starving, drooling scavengers.

It would simply be too singular to survive. Thus it was with Rich Clune’s Twitter account.

Housman’s poem was nothing more than the fin de siècle version of what Neil Young would express 83 years later. Is it better to burn out or fade away? Or is it better still to just ghost?

At some point, Clune killed @richcluneshow. We don’t know when he took his filer à l’anglaise, but we got a picture of the wake via Mike Fisher:

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No explanation immediately forthcoming, we were left simply with our memories:

When Dicky burst on the scene in a series of quickly-deleted barbs fired at the Dallas Stars.
When he shared with us the last page of his new contract.
When he shared with us his unmet contract demands.

He loved especially to take jabs at the Stars (and to a lesser degree, his other former team, the L.A. Kings). He especially liked to poke Tyler Seguin, who he, kind of charmingly, called “a dork.”

During the Night of the Living Dead in Glendale, someone asked Rich what he thought of the situation in Phoenix and he replied with a joke about Charles Keating, for God’s sake. He was funny, clever, trolly and real — everything you’d want out of an athlete’s Twitter account.

The beauty of Rich Clune — both as a person and a Twitter personality — is that he is sarcastically, jokingly arrogant and delightfully self-aware. It’s why he was the inaugural Threero.

His latest project before he nuked the operation: getting on to Team Canada (he didn’t make it, of course). He got Elliotte Friedman on the bandwagon.

But the project closest to his heart was raising money for Renascent Treatment Center — an Ontario facility that helped him get sober. He did a lot of promotion on Twitter and Facebook and was clicking along at a good fundraising pace.

According to Preds PR, Clune hit his goal and that’s where the account went:

That’s a little suspicious sounding, frankly, and not nearly as “straight forward” as the Preds are claiming. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt — after all, there’s always a chance Clune returns — but this is a team that traditionally plays it safe with its personnel. And Clune was the funniest thing to come out from the Predators since “Matt Cullen: First-line center.”

For now, we have nowt but speculation and memories.

We here at III Communication are not ones to wait and wonder. We are people of action. Therefore, we started a petition at Change.org asking Rich Clune to return the joy to our lives.

Please sign. And Rich?