FAREWELL TO ALI
Thousands gather to honor legendary boxer in his hometown of Louisville before Friday’s burial
MUHAMMAD ALI
They brought him LOUISVILLE through the loading dock on the North Wing of the Kentucky Exposition Center and positioned the casket near the easternmost exit, about 7,000 miles from Mecca.
The theme was inclusion; a Muslim prayer service open to all. Yet as much as Muhammad Ali evolved into a unifying force for global good and as many religions, nationalities and ethnicities were represented at Thursday’s Jenazah, the man lived so large a life that his death produced singular and special challenges.
Amanda Storment, vice president of the Kentucky Fair Board, said Thursday’s service required the rental of 180 linear feet of black drapery because the center did not have enough of it in inventory to span a space the length of a football field.
The Ali family had been offered the use of Freedom Hall but chose the adjoining North Wing because of its 234,000 contiguous square feet and its closer proximity to Islam’s holiest city. The mourners arrived in traditional garb and tailored suits, from all points on the compass and from a wide range of social strata.
Thousands of them were not old enough to have borne witness to Ali’s boxing career or to have formed real-time opinions of his positions on civil rights and the Vietnam War. Yet many of them had traveled hundreds of miles to be present at the service, lining the police barricades for cellphone photographs of Ali’s casket, listening quietly to a service conducted primarily in a foreign language.
“He represents so much,” said Aliyah Abdur-Rahman, a 31-yearold Muslim from Atlanta. “He used his boxing as a platform for so much more. He had a greater message for black people, for people of color, and not just for the United States but throughout the world.”
Once the service had ended and Ali’s casket had been wheeled toward a waiting hearse, long lines of Muslim mourners continued to kneel in prayer, oriented to the east. Abdur-Rahman stood lingering with a friend from New Jersey, Farah Qadar, whose father and brothers had joined the line for tickets to Friday’s memorial service at the KFC Yum Center at 4:35 a.m. Wednesday morning.
“My mother and my younger brother felt very strong about it,” Qadar said. “Seeing how important it was to him as a black man, I just felt like I should support him.
“It was a hike and I had work to do, but it was worth it.”
If non-Muslims found the service hard to follow, and equally hard to see in a flat-floored hall illsuited to spectator events, paying respects is primarily about showing up, sublimating self-interest and recognizing the day is about the deceased.
“Even the ones that disliked the statements, even the ones who disliked his boxing style, even the ones who disliked what they would consider to be arrogance — speaking out at a time when most colored people were afraid to — I think most if not all respect the man,” former middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins said. “To speak as boldly and proudly as he did, I wish we had that spirit in a lot of people today.”
Gene Kilroy, formerly Ali’s business manager and one of his honorary pallbearers, maintains a Christian-centric spirituality. Where Muhammad Ali is concerned, though, Kilroy is as inclusive as they come.
“I’m sure when he meets St. Peter, St. Peter will have a cellphone and take a selfie,” he said. “He’ll get him to sign a boxing glove and then go through the golden gates.”