People of a certain age remember Muhammad Ali as the 1960 Olympics gold medalist, the brash young heavyweight champion and one of the most divisive people in the divisive decade of the ‘60s.

Consider what Donald Trump says today about Muslims, and imagine how controversial it was when Ali, immediately after winning the heavyweight championship over Sonny Liston, declared that he was a Muslim and was dropping his “slave name” of Cassius Clay.

Then imagine the firestorm when he refused to be drafted (“No Viet Cong ever called me n—–“).

It was too much for some people. Like Dick Herbert, the crusty sports editor at The News & Observer, where I worked as a teenaged copyboy. Herbert’s politics were as conservative as his plodding prose style (which inspired one sportswriter to dub him “The Master of the Declarative Sentence”).

When Ali changed his name, Herbert wasn’t having any of it. He decreed that all stories and headlines would henceforth refer to him as “Ali (Clay).” Ali might change his name, but Herbert wasn’t.

It would be years before the N&O called Ali what he wanted to be called.

A caveat: I may have this backwards. This is what time and memory can do. I’m not sure whether Herbert decreed that the name run as “Ali (Clay)” or “Clay (Ali).” The latter is even more offensive.