Good to see the Cleveland Baseball Team preparing to drop its longtime name that insults the first Americans. It won’t happen until 2022, according to reports, but it furthers the previous banishing of its cartoonish, racist logo. Of course, there was the typical downside of the national media—in this case The New York Times—delivering the news to Northeast Ohio instead of the media that report on the team every day.

The baseball team is not alone. Lack of respect for the local media is rampant. If the Browns had to change their name, bet that the story would be reported first nationally and probably on television. Is such a thing conceivable? The Browns don’t even have a logo to drop. Guess the team did not want to plaster the mug of founder and legend Paul Brown on the sides of their helmets. This has forced clever Cleveland.com columnist Terry Pluto, a former colleague at the Akron Beacon Journal in days of yore, to take to calling the team “the Orange Helmets” for variation. Really? I mean. . .

Couldn’t Pluto have come up with something cleverer? He’s a word guy. Consult a dictionary. Invest in a thesaurus. Check out an app such as masterwriter.com. There has to be something better than Orange Helmets. Which makes me worry about what the Cleveland Baseball Team and the public might come up with to replace you-know-what. It must be difficult work, this naming thing. The Washington Football Team, which has dropped its even more insulting name, is not proceeding exactly apace to replace it.

While I have sided with those who wished the Cleveland Baseball Team to rid itself of its nickname, I have done so with no little ambivalence. This is not because I do not recognize its insensitivity. Teams should not be named after a people; the Browns probably might have been considered on shaky ground assuming the master’s name. In their case, of course, master is not the derogative term it is when applied to slavery and the sorry-still-unresolved history of the so-called Greatest Nation on Earth. If the ground shook under the Browns, it was because of their coach’s mastery of the game.

Paul Brown could be cantankerous, even combative—ask the late Browns owner Art Modell—but he also was, arguably, the most inventive coach football has ever known. Modell wanted to be boss, though he knew nothing about football compared with Brown. That put Modell in a large class of people. Not many of those, however, would have rid themselves of the very man who had made his team worth owning and a great winner.

To the best of my knowledge, Paul Brown is revered not reviled. Then again, so were many priests, boy scout leaders, and some of the famous in other fields. The Cleveland Baseball Team may have lacked sensitivity for too long after it became obvious that its name was offensive but I used to hear another view from someone with whom I grew up. Bucky Buck—full name Douglas Merle Buck—was a member of the Delaware Tribe. He and I grew up in Oklahoma in a small town in the territory that belongs to the Cherokee Nation, a fact recently confirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

Bucky was a fan of the Cleveland Baseball Team, and he would blister me for using that name instead of the one Bucky wore proudly on his ballcap and other gear until his death in May 2018. Bucky was a strong, tough, proud man, and I Ioved him. We sometimes had opinions that differed but even when we disagreed there existed an unbreakable bond loftier than friendship. We had been teammates and were ’til the end. Bucky helped me with my recently published book—Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart—refreshing my memory and keeping my head on semi-straight when I veered off course.

He thought I had run off the path of right and into the ditch when I supported Colin Kaepernick’s right to protest numerous injustices by kneeling during the national anthem. As I wrote in the book:

“He had strong opinions. He railed at San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick . . . Bucky thought Kaepernick’s concern would be better expressed in the neighborhoods where he saw injustices occurring. Bucky virtually quit watching the NFL.

“Neither could he countenance his Cleveland Indians succumbing to Major League Baseball’s pressure to remove Chief Wahoo, their longtime logo/mascot no longer deemed acceptable. Political correctness had gone too far in the opinion of one of the proudest Native Americans I ever knew.

“ ‘Jim Thorpe,’ ” Bucky said, ‘would have scalped Kaepernick.’ That wasn’t all: ‘My Wahoo ballcap remains on my head in Oklahoma (where there are more tribes represented than anywhere else in the nation) and if someone differs, we can settle that.’ ”

Bucky meant it, and I would not have tested him, even though the cancer that ultimately took him from the many who loved him had returned. “Bucky was a fighter,” I wrote then, “and he was about to prove it.” I was not about to get in the way. I knew Bucky too well. Not to mention, I was too old to enjoy being knocked down, as he had knocked me down so many times on the football field in practice, and together, side-by-side linebackers, we sought to put asunder those who thought to try to run the ball on us.

Bucky’s fight is over, as is this one about the Cleveland Baseball Team’s name. It will change and cleveland.com, at least, got a confirmation that the club will announce this week that it will play under its old name in 2021 “but will drop the ‘Indians’ name after the upcoming season.” If it moves ahead with a replacement name, as The New York Times reported had been confirmed by three sources, it may ask seek suggestions.

Please start thinking now and come up with something snappier than calling the Cleveland Football Team the Orange Helmets. Just know that whatever the new name is, the odds are Bucky Buck would object. He was proud to the end to be an Indian.