There's an over-beers game at least a few journalists have been known to play.

It involves competing to see who can recall the most disdainful rebuff ever encountered when approaching someone for an interview.

These stories can be pretty entertaining. Sometimes the person being approached for a comment was known to loathe the particular news organization or even the specific reporter asking the question. So the refusal to cooperate could be issued in a seething way that was all but dripping with scorn and contempt.

Think of someone trembling with rage.

Now I should make clear, the point of this game is not to revel in memories of dealing with people who were in trouble or on some sort of hot seat. No, the point is to share recollections of the various ways news people have been told to go to blazes.

I can usually hold my own when swapping these blasts from the past. But I think I might have missed a chance to score an epic rebuff about 25 years ago.

I was in a restaurant in The Peabody hotel in Memphis. And I saw novelist Richard Ford at a table with a woman I assumed was his wife.

At that time, I was in the middle of reporting a feature story that involved asking various people to weigh in on some absurd theme I had cooked up. I can't remember exactly what it was. I just know it was a decidedly lightweight premise.

I could have interrupted the notoriously prickly writer and asked him my question. But I elected not to do so.

Have you ever seen a picture of Richard Ford -- maybe appearing with a review of his new book? The guy looks like a raptor. He's not big, as I recall. But he definitely seems like he could get a serious mad on.

OK, for all I know, he might have been a good sport and cheerfully gone along with my pestering. Somehow I doubt it. Especially if it had come out that I hadn't ever been able to finish anything he had written.

But I'll never really know. 

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