“He was amusing, he was attractive, he was the most flawless athlete that you ever saw … and those were his own words”, said Crystal, a longtime pal who Ali called “my little brother”.
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Ali’s funeral and memorial will be Friday.
The hearse stopped at the pink house as the people, many of whom waited in the sun for more than three hours, chanted his name.
“If Muhammad didn’t like the rules, he rewrote them”, Lonnie Ali told the service. “My sincerest condolences to the Ali family!” Just as he shook up the world in life, she said, he’s still shaking it up in death. “And saying, ‘I told you I was the greatest!’ No one compares to you, Daddy”, she said.
In a video tribute sharing what Ali meant to them, a patient of the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center declared, “He never said he can’t do this, so, that has become my motto”. After finishing his routine, Ali gave him a nickname he’d keep for the rest of his life: “Little brother”.
“I think he decided, something I hope every young person here will decide, I think he decided very young to write his own life story”. He also drew big applause recalling Ali’s lighting of the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, “seeing his hands shake and his legs shake and knowing, by God, he was going to make those last few steps, no matter what it took – the flame would be lit, the fight would be won, his spirit would be affirmed”.
The ceremony proved to be a rare combination of politics, sports, entertainment and religion, a testimony of Ali’s impact on so many aspects of life.
The crowd cheered when Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish interfaith magazine Tikkun, made a rousing reference to Hillary Clinton, Bill’s wife and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Muhammad Ali trains at his Pennsylvanian mountain retreat in Owigsburg, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1974 for his fight against George Foreman in Zaire.
“Muhammad Ali’s prominence, being a prominent figure really brought significant awareness to a disease that a lot of people didn’t know much about”, says Chang. The two men were trusted friends, she said. Ali took the idea of “somebody-ness to unheard-of heights”, he said.
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Religious and political leaders joined celebrities, sports stars and tens of thousands of ordinary people yesterday in bidding farewell to Muhammad Ali, the boxing champion who jolted America with his showmanship and won worldwide admiration as a man of conviction.
