Lane Being Lane, John Talty’s definitive new biography of LSU coach Lane Kiffin, could begin with the same line as Emily Wilson’s rendering of The Odyssey: “Tell me about a complicated man.”
For 320 pages, the CBS Sports reporter wrestles with the as-of-yet unanswered question of who Kiffin actually is. Every side of college football’s most polarizing figure is thrust toward an unflinching light: Kiffin the genius, Kiffin the hedonist, Kiffin the boy wonder, Kiffin the man-child, Kiffin on sweet days of victory, Kiffin in dark nights of the soul. The result is a sometimes-funny-sometimes-sad sports biography unusually unencumbered by cliché—one that, due to the coach’s outsized public persona, has more in common with entertainment and music literature than 99% of college football writing.
