The people of Louisville poured into public squares on Saturday night to remember the city’s most beloved son.
They talked about him in terms Muhammad Ali would have appreciated:
He was the greatest.
He was the one and only.
He was the people’s champion.
“We grew up hearing the stories about him. About his goodness,” said 26-year-old Breanna Detenber. She and her husband, Seth, visited a spontaneous memorial in the plaza outside the Muhammad Ali Center. Their family is of mixed race, and their son, Mason, laid roses alongside a picture of Ali.
“For us, he was …”
She stopped, surprised by tears, and turned to Seth. “Say it for me.”
“There will only ever be one Muhammad Ali,” he said.
Hundreds turned out at the memorial, despite gales and spitting rain. They were a testament to the breadth of Ali’s influence: white people, black people. Young, old. Many wearing headscarves, others wearing pinstriped suits.
News of Ali’s death had come early that morning, of complications following three decades battling Parkinson’s disease. His life was paradoxical, frightening to authority figures in the mid-20th century, inspiring to generations that followed.
Ali will be buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill cemetery on Friday. Beforehand, there will be a procession through the streets “to allow anyone who is there from the world to celebrate with him”, family spokesman Bob Gunnell said. It will follow the route of the parade that greeted Ali, then Cassius Clay, home from the Rome Olympics in 1960
But in Louisville on Saturday there was little talk of Ali as a boxer, despite his stature in the ring. People remembered him as a multi-dimensional person: a neighbor, a poet, a singer, a philanthropist.
“There’s a lot of sadness, yes. But people also want to celebrate the variety of his accomplishments,” said Donald Lassere, the president of the Ali Center. “He was an inspiration. To all types of people.”
Teddy Abrams, conductor of the Louisville orchestra, arrived with a keyboard and friends: violinist Scott Moore and percussionist Jecorey Arthur, better known here for rapping under the name 1200.
“Muhammad Ali became a symbol of hope and love, and among other things he was also a musician. He could sing,” Abrams said. “So we came out to bring some of that love and music to the people. Right now people could use a little hope.”
Arthur said that as a boy he felt Ali’s influence in acute ways. Racially, artistically, geographically.
“He wasn’t just from Louisville. He was from West Louisville,” he said. “I’m from West Louisville.”
The city was segregated during Ali’s youth, and he grew up in what was, at the time, a black middle-class neighborhood. It was an in-between sort of place in the southern US in the 1940s and 50s, not wholly belonging to the world of black southernness, but far from white southernness.
“But he made it,” Arthur said. “Ali is forever.”
At Ali’s childhood home – a modest pink house on Grand Avenue – people gathered to leave balloons, flowers, cards, signs. Many lived just blocks away, but others came from distant corners of the country.
Heydt Philbeck, an attorney from Raleigh, took photos of his son, Heydt Jr, outside the home. The father is 49, just old enough to remember some of Ali’s later title bouts in the 1970s. But he and his son talked about all the great moments – fighting Joe Frazier, Sonny Liston, George Foreman – as though they had happened days ago.
After some brief discussion of Michael Jordan, they decided on Muhammad Ali as the greatest sportsman of the age.
“Jordan was great, but everybody thought Ali was going to get killed,” the father said. “The rope-a-dope? Nobody saw that coming.”
Bearing witness to the versatility of Ali’s legacy, Philbeck said he, a middle-aged white attorney, keeps a picture of Ali in his office.
“He inspires me,” he said. “He had to believe he was the greatest before he could be the greatest. And that’s what we all want to be.”
