THE TRUTH ABOUT LANE KIFFIN COMING TO FLORIDA (I think)

I’ve been doubting he would take the Florida job. But now I am beginning to wonder if maybe he’s coming to save the Gators after all.

Is Lane Kiffin a done deal? People keep telling our executive producer Brenden Martin it is.

“I have heard he has agreed to job at UF ...  Supposedly happened prior to Citadel game in Miami” was one of several posts.

From the jump, I’ve been doubting he would take the Florida job. But now I am beginning to wonder if maybe he’s coming to save the Gators after all, even though I can see why Lane Kiffin feels like Oxford is special to him, beyond the pale of just the resurrection of his family ties.

And that doesn’t even include my own personal affinity for Oxford, it being a hotbed of distinguished authors. Just being there among them makes me hope a tiny speck of literary genius will breathe through my nostril for a  nano-second.

The honest answer is that probably nobody knows yet, including Lane, who wants to see how this season plays out.

The rest is nuances — including the money. But that won’t decide it, else LSU would have him locked up.

Oxford has much to offer. According to Oxford PR folks: “Whether visiting Oxford’s historical sites or walking in the steps of William Faulkner, you are sure to find inspiration in a town that inspired Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, as well as other authors like John Grisham, Wright Thompson, Barry Hannah and Willie Morris.”

My kind of town. Indeed, the sweet, soft spirit of the place mixed with the glow of high-grade literature is a powerful draw.

I will always treasure a 1966 trip there during the first SEC Skywriters Tour when my friend Tommy Kelly and I took a ride outside town to view the home of deceased William Faulkner. Once we reached it, we were unable to view his residence from our roadside vantage point, so we climbed the gate fence and walked 50 yards down a pebbled path where we caught a glimpse of the shuttered shrine and  stood there in awe as the brilliant moonlight cut through the Mississippi Pines like a silver laser. 

His spirit spoke to us as would-be authors in a manner that was unforgettable. We stood there speechless, in awe, for almost 10 minutes. Then we turned and went back to our car, never forgetting that moment frozen in time.

I look back fondly and nostalgically at all my trips to Oxford. Once with my late friend and diehard Gator Whit Palmer Jr. We arrived on a private plane right at the waning six-time SEC championship Coach Johnny Vaught’s career, when he had enjoyed such dominance, but suffered a hiccup after a rare one-point loss to Alabama the week prior. I  marveled at how he had coached so brilliantly.

“Yeah,” growled the cabbie, “but a beats a beat.” This was about to become the Rebels’ third straight “beat.“ That year he would suffer a third straight loss from junior quarterback Steve Spurrier, 17-0.

Those were  two of several special trips I made to Oxford. 

One of the more (or less) notable ones came in 1967 on the second visit ever by the original SEC Skywriters. My roommate Neil Amdur, then of the Miami Herald and later the New York Times sports editor, had written a very caustic lead about the demise of Vaught’s reign toward its end after last year’s trip there. And the angry folks at Oxford were  at the airport to remind Neil of his words “Age, apathy and apartheid …” used to describe the Mississippi struggle to overcome a racially charged  history.

I went there again in 1994, highlighted by a 38-14 Gator victory. My late wife Joni and I drove to Oxford from Denver and were able to drink in the delights of The Grove, including the accoutrements of the well-dressed skirted,  shirt-and-tied Rebel fans resplendent with Chandeliered tailgates.

So I got to thinking that it would be interesting to write a piece with artificial inelligence through the voice of the famous author with a touch of nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, as the  metaphor. 

Here is that effort. With my apologies to William Faulkner:

I remember, as one remembers the long shadow cast by late autumn, the far and flickering gleam of floodlights upon red clay, how Lane Kiffin came walking across the hush of grass soaked through with the memory of a thousand Friday nights, bearing the weight of names and rumors and the heavy hush of expectation, the kind that curls along the eaves and settles in the bones until even eggshell shivers with the knowledge. 

They hollered for him, called him redeemer, called him a scoundrel, his steps falling soft as rain after drought, each one disturbing silted secrets and older wounds unhealed.

I sat atop my wall, watcher and waited-on, more a monument to the folly of hope than a sentry, my shell grown brittle not from the wind but from the long patience of time. He passed beneath, Lane Kiffin, and all the king’s horses turned their black liquid eyes, all the king’s men leanin’ on fences where the white paint peels in sheets, and they whispered, too, about what a man carries and what he must lay down — none knowing it is not the fall that undoes you but the thought, the foreknowledge of the plummet. 

I held my piece, cracked but not yet shattered, while on the field below him eyes shone with that same silty faith that maybe, just maybe tonight, the reckoning could be postponed.

There in the hum, the chill before the snap, I saw it plain: men like Lane living betwixt silver whistle and the long gray hush, loving a game where your victories run through your fingers like Sunday water and your losses last as long as twilight. I am Humpty, and I have fallen; I know the song and the silence that follows, the gathering, the hands that cannot fix what was, and I know that Lane, too, hears footsteps on gravel, the wall at his back not stone but hunger and hope and time itself. We are kin by falling. We are revealed by what cannot be put back together.

—

What does that mean? I haven’t a clue, do you? I never got The Sound And The Fury, either.