Photo: THE RING

Roses were tossed on the windshield of Muhammad Ali’s hearse on Friday. Fans ran alongside the vehicle, close enough to touch, which many of them did.

Ali’s 19-mile funeral procession through his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky attracted thousands of well-wishers on Friday morning. They sought to say goodbye to “The Greatest” in the most personal of ways: By reaching out and touching the hearse. Ali, the most personable and approachable of champions, would have surely appreciated the gesture.

The motorcade started a second day of mourning for the heavyweight great, who died early Saturday morning after a long battle with Parkinson’s. Ali’s legacy — in the ring, in popular culture, in the political and civil rights arenas, has been hailed all week. Now it was time to bid farewell to an athlete who transcended the ring and became a global icon.

At 9:37 a.m. 17 limousines started to pull into the AD Porter & Sons Funeral Home to prepare for the slow motorcade through Ali’s hometown. Three helicopters offering aerial coverage could be heard humming overhead. At 10:27, the pallbearers, including Mike Tyson, helped carry Ali’s casket into the hearse to start the procession.

A little after 10:30 – an hour after the procession was scheduled to begin — the hearse pulled out of the driveway and started its trek. Tyson, a last minute addition to the list of pallbearers, took a red eye from Las Vegas to Louisville to be a part of it all. An interfaith memorial service is scheduled for Friday at 2 p.m.

The procession route, which was planned by Ali’s family years in advance, started at A.D. Porter & Sons and traveled downtown, pausing at the $80 million Muhammad Ali Center, on 6^th street. Eventually, it turned on Muhammad Ali Blvd., passing his old home on Grand Street on the west side of town and winding back on Broadway across from his former school, Central HS. The procession ended at Cave Hill Cemetery, where he was interred in a Muslim burial. By the time the hearse arrived at the cemetery, clusters of roses and other flowers rested on the roof and windshield of the car.

When the vehicles moved passed his old home, now a museum, security had to ask the crush of fans to back up to allow the cars to move through, everybody wanted to get as close as they could. Ali loved crowds so it was fitting.

“He inspired me to be great,” five-time champion Evander Holyfield said on ESPN, which covered the morning procession. “He inspired me not to quit. Life is about if you don’t quit you’ll eventually get there. Ali looked beatable. I looked beatable. It shows you in life it’s not how you look — it’s what you believe.”

Mitch Abramson is a former reporter for the New York Daily News and can be reached on Twitter at: @Mabramson13.