In the Kentucky town where a well-meaning policeman once encouraged the young Cassius Clay to take up boxing to protect himself against local thieves, a proud community gathered to mourn their town’s most famous son.
Flags in Louisville were lowered to half mast and the city’s mayor led a short ceremony on Saturday, hours after the world learned of Muhammad Ali’s death at the age of 74.
The self-proclaimed Greatest was warmly remembered in his childhood city, where many were able to claim to have shared memories with the man widely seen as the greatest sports personality in history.
Ali, who died in hospital outside Phoenix in the early hours of Saturday, remained close to many in Louisville, where he lived as a child in a small wooden-framed house on Grand Avenue that was recently restored and opened to the public.
“Muhammad Ali belongs to the world, but he only has one hometown,” the town’s mayor, Greg Fischer, told the gathered mourners. “The Louisville lip spoke to everyone, but we heard him in a way that no one else could, as our brother, our uncle and our inspiration.”
The mayor’s office said flags would remain at half-mast until Ali was laid to rest in the city, which is home to the Muhammad Ali Center, a museum dedicated to his legacy, and where he made his last formal appearance in October 2015.
It was on the streets of Louisville that unknown thieves stole 12-year-old Clay’s red-and-white Schwinn bicycle after he rode to the Louisville Service Club, where children could get free snacks. Furious, he told the local policeman Joe Martin that he planned to “whup” the mystery thug.
The story goes that Martin, who taught boxing in the club’s basement, told him he had “better learn to box first” and coached his young protege to six Kentucky Golden Gloves titles and on to the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, where Ali won a gold medal and decided to turn professional.
Karen Montgomery Williams, 61, told the local Courier-Journal that the young Clay was her first babysitter when she was five or six years old. “Most of the time we would sit in front of the TV, and if it was boxing, he would make us be quiet,” she said. “He would shadow-box around the living room. He was a braggart even then. He said he was going to be the champion of the world. He was a braggart even then. We said, sure, we hear you, but I never imagined that he meant what he was talking about. And it came true.”
Jan Waddell, Ali’s first cousin, remembered how the older boy would lift him and his brother over his head, using them as weights. “He never beat me up, but he taught me to fight,” he told the paper. “Some kids would want to beat us up, just so they could say they beat up Cassius Clay’s cousins.”
Fischer paid tribute to the local institutions that helped forge Ali’s early identity, including the hospital where he was born on 17 January 1942. “Imagine that day, that little boy, eyes wide open looking around the room at the old Louisville general hospital, not knowing the life that awaited him. The life he would make. The world he would shake up, and the people he would inspire.”
As three Louisville metro police officers lowered the stars and stripes outside the mayor’s office, a young boy in the crowd could be seen saluting.
