2016 has been a truly awful year for celebrity deaths. We’ve already said goodbye to two of the biggest rock stars of all time in David Bowie and Prince, and now on Friday the world was forced to mourn one if its greatest athletes, Muhammad Ali.
There aren’t too many people who could say they were more influential than Prince, but Ali is one of them. When the two icons met for the first time in 1997 for a charity event, it was Prince who was starstruck by the boxing legend.
In a press conference taken at The World Honors Healing event, Prince explained how honored he was to meet his hero, and how he would have done literally anything he had asked him to do.
“My friend Londell McMillian called me a couple of days ago, and he said, Muhammad wants you to… and I said ‘Yes’. I didn’t even let him finish. He could have said, ‘mow the lawn,’ and I would have been down with it. Muhammad’s my hero. He has been since I was a child. As you can see, he’s such an inspiration to many people.”
I’m willing to bet that Muhammad Ali is the only person on Earth who could have gotten Prince to mow his lawn in 1997, and now I really wish it had happened.
