Ali died Friday at the age of 74 after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease.
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Now its the turn of Louisville, Kentucky to celebrate one of their biggest exports to the world.
15,000 tickets were made available for the event and, according to a report from ESPN.com, the tickets to Ali’s memorial service were sold out in just over an hour – 65 minutes to be exact.
For those who did not get tickets to the memorial planned at KFC Yum!
One post on Craigslist offered to sell six lower-level seats for $100 each, while other posts offered to sell tickets to Thursday’s Jenazah – an Islamic prayer service – at Freedom Hall. Some people were scalping the tickets online, although numerous postings were quickly flagged and removed. Center Wednesday, June 8, 2016, in Louisville, Ky.
“Today is about making sure they’ve got that connection to Muhammad Ali”, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said in an interview on Wednesday. During that private moment between the procession and the memorial service, Bounce will air The Greatest, the 1977 film starring Ali as himself.
Ali’s funeral procession will travel along the street named for him, Muhammad Ali Boulevard, and past his boyhood home before heading to Cave Hill Cemetery, where he will be buried. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and King Abdullah II of Jordan plan to attend, and actor Will Smith and former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis are among eight pallbearers. One wrote that he and his mother were driving in from Chicago for the service for the boxing great and willing to pay $50 for two tickets.
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“The last time I met him was in Cleveland, Ohio, he was promoting his cologne”, said community activist Imam Paul Hasan.
