Muhammed Ali funeral: Stars, politicians and 15,000 fans turn out in Louisville to send off The Greatest

The people's champ could not have wished for a more perfect send-off. The sky over his native Louisville was crystal blue. Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis – two of his successors when the heavyweight crown still meant something – were among the pall bearers. At the funeral service a king was in attendance and a former president spoke. But, best of all, the people, the ordinary people who he had thrilled, inspired, and given hope, were there en masse to say goodbye.

That was exactly how Muhammad Ali, that most accessible of sports heroes, wanted it. He had planned his own passing. The ceremony in the main sports arena in Kentucky’s largest city was attended by the inevitable phalanx of VIPs – politicians, sportsmen, celebrities of every walk of life and hue. But 15,000 ordinary people were there too. In death too, Ali was accessible to everyone.

On the streets outside the crowds were even greater, lined in their tens of thousands along the 19-mile route of the funeral procession, as the hearse, passed his childhood home and through the neighbourhoods where he was just a kid named Cassius Clay. “Al-i, Al-i,” they chanted.

Behind the limousine, covered in an Islamic tapestry and strewn with flowers, a kid was keeping pace, shadow boxing as he trotted along. Finally the champ was laid to rest in Louisville’s Cave Hill cemetery, beneath a simple gravestone inscribed simply, Ali.

The pomp came later at the memorial service, Islamic but interfaith. As with the best funerals, sadness mixed with joyful exuberance. And coursing through everything was a contemporary political relevance that Ali would have loved.

Republicans and Democrats may be girding for the most brutal presidential campaign in decades, while Muslims and Islam are not exactly beloved in America right now. Yet the commemoration of a man who turned from pariah into America’s most adored son, showed that unity, albeit fleeting, is not impossible.

It began not with a Christian prayer but with a recitation in Arabic from the Koran. The verses were translated by an immigrant girl from Syria, now a resident of Louisville, emblem of a dreadful conflict whose horrors rival those of the Vietnam war that Ali paid so high a professional price for opposing.

The people’s champ, one would presume, was a Democrat. But the second speaker was Orrin Hatch, the extremely conservative Republican senator from Utah. He too was a personal friend of Ali. Then rabbi Michael Lerner took the stage. “How do you honour Muhammad Ali?,” he asked. “By acting like Muhammad Ali.”

If ever someone could bridge the suspicions between these faiths, the divisions in American politics, even in the Middle East, it was he. And in the sports arena too, the chant rang out, “Al-i, Al-i.” “God bless you my friend,” said Bill Clinton as he wrapped up proceedings, “Go in faith.”

Above all though, with Muhammad Ali you couldn’t be miserable. The comedian Billy Crystal recounted how he and Ali had broken down with laughter swapping jokes at the funeral of the sportscaster Howard Cosell, another friend and foil of the boxer, as brash and cocksure as the champion in his pomp. “Ali ran with the gods,” Crystal said, “he walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.”