Lonnie Ali was the picture of grace and dignity as she spoke of her husband Muhammad Ali, man the world had come to know as “The Greatest.”
Early in her remarks during Muhammad Ali’s memorial service on Friday at the YUM Center in Louisville she reminded the audience that a police officer helped launch his famed boxing career – and what that kind of relationship can mean in this nation.
“We cannot forget a Louisville police officer, Joe Martin, who embraced a young 12-year-old boy in distress when his bicycle was stolen,” Lonnie Ali said. “Joe Martin handed young Cassius Clay the keys to a future in boxing he could scarcely have imagined.
America must never forget, when a cop and an inner city kid talk to each other, then miracles can happen.”
Lonnie Ali said “Muhammad knew instinctively the road he needed to travel. He lived in the moment. He neither dwelled in the past nor harbored anxiety about the future. Muhammad loved to laugh and loved to play practical jokes on just about everybody. He was sure footed in his self-awareness, secure in his faith and he did not fear death.
“Yet his timing is once again poignant. His passing and its meaning for our time should not be overlooked as we face uncertainty in the world and divisions at home as to who we are as a people.”
She said Ali’s life “provides youthful guidance.”
“Muhammad was not one to give up on the power of understanding; the boundless possibilities of love and the strength of our diversity. He counted among his friends people of all political persuasions, saw truth in all faiths and the nobility of all races.”
In regard to his stand against entering the draft and refusing to serve in Vietnam, she said “Muhammad may have challenged his government, but he never ran from it, or from America.”
“He loved this country and he understood the hard choices that are born of freedom. I think he saw a nation’s soul measured by the soul of its people. He saw the good soul in everyone.
“He awoke every morning thinking about his own salvation and he would often say ‘I just want to get to heaven. And I have to do a lot of good deeds to get there. I think Muhammad’s hope is that his life provides some guidance as to how we might achieve for all people what we aspire for ourselves and our families.”
She said it was fitting that Ali’s final memorial service and burial was in the city “he always returned to after his greatest triumphs.
“Muhammad never stopped loving Louisville. And we know Louisville loves Muhammad,” she said to loud cheering.
The service lasted three hours, ending with remarks from President Bill Clinton.
“Muhammad is saying ‘I made you go last so I guaranteed you would get a standing ovation,” Clinton chuckled.
“We all have an Ali story. We should honor him by letting our gifts go to the world just as he did. Every one of us have gifts of mind and heart. He just found a way to release his,” he said.
He also shared the story of the night Ali lit the Olympic flame to open the 1996 Games in Atlanta – during his presidency.
“The man I watched take the last steps to light the Olympic flame when I was president; I’ll never forget it. I was sitting there in Atlanta. By then we knew each other. By then I felt I had some sense of what he was living with – and I was still weeping like a baby seeing his hand shake and his leg shake and knowing, by God, he was going to make those last few steps no matter what it took. The flame would be lit, the fight would be won,” Clinton said to a loud ovation.
Senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, whose uncle was an Ali pallbearer, spoke on behalf of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.
She read a tribute written by the president.
“The man we celebrate today is not just a boxer or poet; or an agitator or a man of peace. He was not just a Muslim or a black man, or a Louisville kid. He even wasn’t just the greatest of all time. He was Muhammad Ali. The whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
“As he once put it, Muhammad Ali was America. Brash, defiant, pioneering, joyful; never tired, always game to test the odds. He was our most basic freedoms; religion, speech, spirit. He embodied our ability to invent ourselves. His life spoke to our origins in slavery and discrimination and the journey he traveled helped to shock our confidence and lead us on a roundabout path to salvation. Like America, he was always very much a work in progress.
“Ali was a radical, even in a radical of times. A loud, proud and unabashedly black voice in a Jim Crow world. His jabs knocked some sense into us. pushing us to expand our imagination and bring others into our understanding.
“He chose to help perfect a nation where a descendant of slaves could become the king of the world. And while doing so, lending some dignity to all of us. And he helped inspire a young mixed kid with a funny name to have the audacity to believe he could be anything, even the president of the United States.”
