Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/696273
8 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.16 LOUISVILLE LIP ymcalouisvillechildcare.org About the cover Standing on Second Street as Muham- mad Ali's funeral procession rolled east on Broadway toward Cave Hill Ceme- tery, I kept thinking: How can the hearse driver see through all the fowers on the windshield? Thick crowds had formed — throughout the city, the world — and occa- sionally somebody ran into the middle of the road to touch the hearse as it passed, to add a stemmed rose to the growing pile. "Ali! Ali! Ali!" The chants must've sounded similar when he was foating and stinging in the ring. "As we rode in the streets, I have never seen something like this," an imam said later during Ali's memorial service. "I witnessed the power of sainthood." On Father's Day, the last Sunday of spring, I went to Ali's plot at Cave Hill. No gravestone yet, but more fowers, fags and photos decorated the earth. A twig speared a tiny piece of paper into the ground. In lowercase letters, a child's hand- writing: "i love ali." I still can't shake the thought that, in the end, the dimensions of the rectangle in the ground are the same for all of us. Even a giant. As a monthly magazine, what could we add to the conversation right now? We wondered how to capture love — ours for him, his for us — and loss in one image. I reached out to George Lois, the former Esquire art director who designed several Ali covers, including the iconic image from April 1968 of Ali impaled with arrows like St. Sebastian, a martyr for refusing to fght a war he didn't believe in. "You should do something that's really meaningful for Louisville," Lois said. He sent me the words on the inside front cover, a poem Ali wrote when he still went by Cassius Clay. I was a boy when Ali carried the Olympic torch in Atlanta. "Why is he shaking?" I asked my dad. That's my frst memory of him. Others in the offce remember listen- ing to his fghts live on the radio. Ali lived two lives. I could never quite wrap my head around how Parkinson's in the second act