The A-list

In Ali’s final big show, Hollywood royalty attended a sendoff worthy of a king
David Beckham
Beckham

The glittering roster of celebrities at yesterday’s Muhammad Ali memorial service is still growing, according to news reports — attesting to the enduring star power of the late prize fighter, who rocketed to global fame from a racially segregated childhood in 1940s Louisville.

Among the latest bold-face names to emerge: actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who Instagrammed a grinning selfie with eulogist and former President Bill Clinton), and David Beckham, the retired British superstar soccer player.

 

Beck’s wife, Victoria, the former Spice Girl singer, wasn’t spotted with him at the KFC Yum Center, where the number of mourners at the afternoon event ran as high as 20,000, according to Britain’s Mirror.

Whoopi Goldberg
Goldberg

Other celebrities whose attendance wasn’t previously reported included View talk show host Whoopi Goldberg; filmmaker Spike Lee; actor and former pro-football player Carl Weathers, and triple-platinum former singer Yusuf (Cat Stevens) Islam, says Britain’s Daily Mail and one of Boulevard’s Facebook friends.

They joined already known attendees, including comedian Billy Crystal, who gave one of the eulogies; actor and pallbearer Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith; Today show host Matt Lauer and former host Bryant Gumbel; retired pro boxer Mike Tyson — and the realest of royalty: King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Trump sends regrets

Rumors GOP White House hopeful Donald Trump would attend were quashed during the morning when Ali family spokesman Bob Gunnell said the reality TV star called Ali’s wife, Lonnie, to say he was unable to come, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Ali was one of the world’s most high-profile Muslims, so it’s hard to imagine Trump would have been welcome, given his call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

The KFC Center service capped a week that drew tens of thousands of spectators earlier yesterday to a 23-mile funeral procession that snaked through the city — all broadcast live to millions online and on television the day he was buried. Chanting “Ali, Ali!” fans waved to celebrities riding with other Ali family guests in the 17-car motorcade. Security, which included the U.S. Secret Service, was tight; an estimated 500 Louisville police officers were there.

Ali and close family and advisors planned the funeral in secret during the final years of his decades-long battle against Parkinson’s disease. Born in Louisville’s West End in 1942, he died at 74 on June 3 in Phoenix, his primary home. He was buried yesterday at a so-far undisclosed gravesite at Cave Hill Cemetery, joining a Kentucky who’s-who of governors, business titans and other luminaries — the most famous being KFC founder Harland Sanders.

The motorcade entered Cave Hill’s iconic main entrance on a carpet of flower petals fans laid earlier in the day:
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Sporting Scene

Only 329 days, 5 hours, 11 minutes, and 13 seconds before this cray-craziness returns

We’re talking about the 143rd Kentucky Derby, of course! That’s according to our exclusive 2017 Derby Countdown Clock™. Until then, here’s figure skaters Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir at this year’s first Saturday in May.
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Investing

This week’s winning stock is…

Papa John's logoHere are shares of big employers in the Boulevard Stock Portfolio, ranked by weekly performance at today’s closing price, with the S&P 500 index for comparison. Starting this week, we’re adding a new one to the portfolio: Qingdao Haier Co., which we’ll be referring to simply as Haier; its shares are listed on the Shanghai exchange.

The Chinese company completed its $5.6 billion purchase of 6,000-employee Appliance Park on Monday, along with the rest of GE’s “white goods” business, making refrigerators and other residential appliances. Boulevard will continue to track GE’s stock, too, given all the shareholders in Louisville.

Haier (pronounced “hire”) didn’t have the best debut here; shares fell 2% from a week ago, to $9.18.

Top stocks June 10

Latest Headlines

Ali 1942-2016 | THOUSANDS GATHER FOR FAREWELL TO LOUISVILLE’S FAVORITE SON

Muhammad Ali is being honored and buried today with more pomp and circumstance than his hometown has seen in recent memory. Updated 2:55 p.m.

The funeral procession for the prize fighter and globally famous humanitarian started at 9 a.m. The roughly 17-car motorcade, including a hearse carrying his body, passed places significant in his life, including his boyhood home in the West End, down the boulevard named for him, and the Muhammad Ali Center he opened in 2005, according to The Courier-Journal.

Bill Clinton
Clinton

Amid heightened security, the procession was expected to take more than 90 minutes and include rolling street closures by police. It will end with a private burial in an undisclosed location at Cave Hill Cemetery in the Highlands, which will be closed to the public. Pallbearers are to include actor Will Smith, who portrayed Ali in the 2001 film of the same name, and boxer Mike Tyson.

Today’s events will culminate in a 2 p.m. memorial service at the KFC Yum Center before an estimated 15,000 people. President Clinton, the comedian Billy Crystal, and other luminaries will deliver eulogies. King Abdullah II of Jordan also was to be there.

But another prominent guest, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, cut his visit short and did not plan to attend today’s memorial service amid reports of a rift with the organizers, according to Britain’s Daily Mail. He attended a Muslim prayer ceremony for Ali yesterday, but left the city after his slot was cut from the speakers’ programs because of time constraints. Erdoğan came to Louisville because he was said to have admired Ali, as a committed Muslim and civil rights campaigner.

Security was to be extensive for perhaps hundreds of thousands of mourners along the procession route, and to protect the visiting world leaders. An estimated 500 Louisville police officers were to line the route and secure other locations. The Secret Service will be present as well.

Ali
Watch Ali trailer.

The Ali Center planned to stream the Yum center memorial service from its website; details. Local TV stations are broadcasting live, as was CNN and The New York Times. The Today show‘s Matt Lauer led reporting from the city. The CJ is providing fresh updates. And Twitter is awash in Tweets, where actor Smith is now trending.

Ali and his inner circle planned this week’s services in secrecy during the years he battled Parkinson’s disease. He died last week in Phoenix, his primary home, at 74.

Media and Marketing

In the ring he was Ali, but in newspapers he was still Clay
Cassius Clay
The Courier-Journal’s first reference to Ali by his chosen name didn’t come until 1969, five years after he adopted it.

Shortly after he defeated Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight title in February 1964, Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali. The new name, bestowed by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, “was important to Ali, who referred to Cassius Clay as his slave name and took umbrage when people used it,” The New York Times says in a new story.

Muhammad Ali
Ali in 1967.

But in The Courier-Journal, the Times, and many other papers and magazines, “Cassius Clay won the Liston rematch in 1965, Cassius Clay beat Cleveland Williams in 1966, and Cassius Clay refused to be inducted into the Army in 1967.”

Indeed, the earliest CJ reference to the late Louisville native by his chosen name didn’t come until Aug 24, 1969, when the paper’s Bill Petersen interviewed him in Chicago, according to a search this morning of the CJ archives in Newspapers.com. At the time, Ali faced five years in prison and a $10,000* fine after his 1967 draft evasion conviction; on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually threw it out. (Correction: In fact, the CJ used “Ali” as early as 1964, the year he adopted it; please read this new  post.)

Under a Page One headline that said, “Going to Jail for Beliefs Appeals to Cassius, Deposed Champ,” Peterson wrote: “The mature Muhammad Ali — Cassius Clay, if you prefer — looked good. He was still [lightning] fast. His shoulders and biceps were immense. His stomach was flat.”

Ali died last week in Phoenix, his primary home, after battling Parkinson’s disease for decades; he was 74. He will be buried at Cave Hill Cemetery today.

* $65,000 in 2016 dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

The A-list
Helicopter
(Probably not Schnatter’s.)

“I can’t wait until my time is that precious.”

— an unidentified woman, after hearing attorney Bill Bardenwerper tell a community meeting that it actually took Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter a full 15 minutes — rather than only 10 — to drive to company headquarters from his mansion in exclusive Anchorage. Schnatter met with neighbors last night to promise he’d limit his nearby helicoptering to cut down on any noise it created, according to Insider Louisville.

Schnatter’s palatial 40,000-square-foot home sits on 16 acres, and features a 22-car underground garage:

John Schnatter's house
(If there’s a chopper pad there, we don’t see it.)