No. 113: NAME WITHHELD / On further review, Jim Brown wasn't "my toughest interview." No, that would be the convicted sex offender who talked to me about his molestation of young boys.

Yeah, I spoke too soon about the most daunting interview. I suspect I've been trying to suppress the memory of this one. If it didn't traumatize me, the hate mail did.

Okay, a couple of weeks ago I wrote that a conversation with Jim Brown about Michael Jordan in 1998 was the “toughest interview” of my career. I’d like to attach an asterisk to that or at least a qualifier: The time I had Jim Brown on the line was the toughest interview of my sportswriting career, but not of my journalism career, which runs the gamut you’d expect of folks who’ve done general-assignment work in a newsroom. Only in the aftermath of writing the Jim Brown piece did I recall the hate mail drawn by another piece I wrote—in fact, I even got jabs and dirty looks in the office when the story was published.