As the headline above makes clear, another foreign-language news story has popped up in our search results. And it’s Tribu magazine again. Our foreign news desk has once more turned to Google to translate; for Spanish speakers, an excerpt:
Señor Smith
La procesión contó además varias limusinas que transportaban a los hijos y los nietos del ex boxeador, así como a las personalidades que llevarán su féretro: el actor Will Smith y los excampeones del mundo de los pesos pesados Lennox Lewis y Mike Tyson. Los aficionados arrojaron flores en el coche fúnebre, mientras que pétalos de rosa estaban dispersos a lo largo de la ruta. Los camioneros sonaban sus bocinas en señal de saludo.
Our last Tribu challenge, about l’attrice con l’Oscar Jennifer Lawrence, was in Italian. Smith was a pallbearer at Muhammad Ali’s burial Friday at Cave Hill Cemetery. The Louisville native died June 3 in Phoenix, his primary home; he was 74.
“We took what in today’s light is an oddly hostile approach on the specific issue of Ali’s name, which did little to help race relations in a turbulent time.”
— The Courier-Journal, in an unsigned editorial this morning, belatedly apologizing for the newspaper’s waiting so long to use Muhammad Ali’s adopted name, after he rejected the one given at birth: Cassius Clay.
The editorial followed a New York Times article Thursday, pointing out this failing on the part of many papers, the Times included. The Louisville paper’s apology is certainly welcome. But was it prompted by the Times story? Or was it already in the works?
Worth noting: In a search this week, the first “Ali” reference Boulevard could find in the CJ’s online database was a page-one story in 1969, five years after he’d chosen the new name. But that’s incorrect; “Ali” appears the year he adopted it — 1964 — although editors didn’t take it seriously until many years later.
Yesterday morning was the first time Cave Hill Cemetery allowed the public to visit Muhammad Ali’s grave, the day after he was buried there. Here are excerpts from some of the first accounts.
It would have looked like any unremarkable rectangle of fresh sod had people not been snapping photos. A few brought flowers, one left a tiny set of boxing gloves. A man unfurled an Islamic flag and laid it alongside the grave. His headstone will be simple when it’s installed, in keeping with Muslim tradition. It will be inscribed with just one word: Ali (Associated Press).
From midnight until well after dawn, Louisville Police Det. Tom Hodgkins sat alone in his car atop an embankment deep in the heart of Cave Hill. There in the dark, with his engine turned off and windows rolled down, the only sound he could hear was a splashing fountain just down the hill. “If I said I didn’t go down there and spend a little time with the champ, I’d be lying,” Hodgkins said. “This place will never be the same. This little corner, anyway” (Courier-Journal).
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.
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: Embed from Getty Images
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
News about business and culture in Louisville, Ky.
Boulevard 