As Lane Kiffin begins to recruit for FAU, he has some fences to mend with a nearby high school.
While Kiffin will certainly enjoy the glamorous, upscale lifestyle of living in Boca Raton, Fla., there’s more to Palm Beach County, namely a small town called Pahokee.
When Kiffin was at Tennessee in 2009, Florida and UT were both after a Pahokee High School wideout Nu’Keese Richardson. Kiffin and assistant Eddie Gran successfully flipped Richardson to the Vols, and Kiffin didn’t have the nicest things to say about Pahokee at a celebratory breakfast event when telling stories from the recruiting trail.
“For those of you who haven’t been to Pahokee, there ain’t much going on,” Kiffin said, per AL.com’s Joseph Goodman. “You take that hour drive up from South Florida, there ain’t a gas station that works. Nobody’s got enough money to even have shoes or a shirt on.”
He further accused the school and town of shady dealings when it came to recruits, describing how Richardson’s aunts handled getting the Letter of Intent to Tennessee.
“You can’t understand how hard this is to get done,” Kiffin said at the breakfast. “(Gran) had this set up at 7 o’clock in the morning, (Richardson’s aunts) got the papers signed by the kid. They didn’t go do it at the school because they knew somebody at the school was going to screw it up, the fax machine wouldn’t work or they would have changed the signatures. All the things that go on in Pahokee now.
“The aunts took it over to a junior high, found a fax machine that worked and faxed them over to us at 7 o’clock and I kept it in a drawer ’til their 1 o’clock press conference.”
Those comments led to a ban until he apologized. Kiffin didn’t initially apologize until Gran was later asked to leave the campus on a recruiting trip. Now, however, there does not appear to be bad blood with the former Pahokee coach.
“We’re not holding any grudges,” said Blaze Thompson, Pahokee’s coach in 2009. “We’re not going to do that, or bring that up when he comes to town. We want him to come to town, we want him to recruit, but it’s funny, though. We were really upset.”
Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaigns of Fred Taylor and Andruw Jones.
