He's spent decades collecting Muhammad Ali memorabilia. Now it's hitting the auction block

Two moments in 1988 sparked what has become Troy Kinunen's decadeslong quest to collect artifacts from the life and times of Louisville icon Muhammad Ali.

One was when, as a freshman in college, he bought a poster from Ali's Nov. 14, 1966, fight against Cleveland Williams at the Astrodome in Houston because he said it was one of the few items he could afford at a sports memorabilia convention in New York.

The other was when he came face to face with "The Greatest" for the first time during a similar event in Chicago.

According to Kinunen, Ali was signing autographs at a table with New York Yankees legends Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio when he and a friend from college approached. A devout baseball fan, Kinunen said he was most excited to meet the MLB Hall of Famers but was underwhelmed by their demeanor.

Mantle, he said, offered only a grumble when he asked for his baseball to be signed. DiMaggio "wouldn't even look up."

"This kind of sucks," Kinunen remembers thinking that day. "This isn't too fun."

The mood changed when he and his friend reached Ali's seat at the table. Kinunen said the boxer, who was only four years removed from making public his bout with Parkinson's disease, started "interacting right away."

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"(Ali) stands up and he says, "Hey, I want to fight you,'" Kinunen said. "He (was) talking to my buddy, Darrell. He says, 'You look like Mike Tyson. I want to fight Mike Tyson.'

"We went back behind the table, and he put his dukes up and we sparred and it's like, 'Holy cow. Muhammad Ali is taking time to spend with me.' It was such a different experience."

"The lightning bolt hit me at that point. I said, 'Yeah, I'm gonna focus on collecting Muhammad Ali.'"

More than 30 years and 1,600 keepsakes later, Kinunen has amassed one of the most extensive Ali collections in the world. It includes everything from the second-earliest known photo of Ali as a child in the mid-1940s to the mouth guard he wore and the belt he won when he rope-a-doped his way to victory against George Foreman in "The Rumble in the Jungle." He even found an unopened bottle of Muhammad Ali Original Old Kentucky Cabin Barbecue Sauce from the 1970s.

Some of these artifacts won't be Kinunen's much longer, though. His collection is the centerpiece of an online sports memorabilia auction hosted by Texas-based Heritage Auctions. Bidding ends Friday.

"Quite simply, it is the most comprehensive Muhammad Ali collection ever to come to auction," said Chris Ivy, Heritage's director of sports auctions, in a statement. "What Troy has done here is tell Ali’s life story with treasures that were present for every bout and every brag and every historic highlight in between. It’s one of the most extraordinary collections we have ever been honored to offer."

Doing the legwork in Louisville

In the early days of Kinunen's collecting, he had no eBay or Facebook Marketplace to scour for treasures from Ali's past.

Instead, he said he took out half-page ads in the Courier Journal intermittently "for close to a decade" in hopes that Louisville residents would reach out with items that would make drives from Wisconsin worthwhile.

"Muhammad Ali, he only retired (seven) years (before) I started collecting him, and there was really no market for him," Kinunen said. "So there really wasn't anything that was in my collection that was really expensive. I probably spent as much time looking for it and researching it and running ads and driving around the country getting it done than I did actually paying for it. There just wasn't a market."

Sure enough, Kinunen said the calls started coming: from Ali's former classmates at Central High School; fellow residents of the Parkland neighborhood who were familiar with a young Cassius Clay from around the block; individuals who sat in on one of the boxer's training sessions or attended some of his first matches through the Louisville Golden Gloves Association.

All of them, according to Kinunen, had brushes with Ali that mirrored his experience meeting "The Greatest" back in 1988.

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"He would literally give them the glove off his hand or the robe off his back or the trunks off his butt if they had asked him for it," Kinunen said. "Everybody, without fail, they all shared the same magical experience of him. No matter (if) they spent an hour or a day or a week or bumped into him one time or five times or seven times, they all felt that they were personal friends of Muhammad Ali, and he made them feel that way."

Kinunen was also able to make contact with one of Ali's aunts, who sold him the rare childhood photo dating back to the 1940s. Other memorable finds from the boxer's early years hitting the auction block include: a page from the Courier Journal advertising Ali's first professional fight against Tunney Hunsaker on Oct. 29, 1960; the original photo of a teenage Ali posing with Joe Martin, the Louisville police officer who encouraged him to channel his anger over a stolen bike in the boxing gym; and a poster for Ali's Golden Gloves bout in February 1960 against Martin's son, which Heritage Auctions touts as "the earliest Clay/Ali boxing poster that exists."

For the heavyweight bidders

There are two artifacts from Kinunen's sprawling collection that he holds most dear. They also happen to be the only two pieces in the lot with an estimated value of $1 million and up.

One is the red robe Ali wore into the ring for his first bout against Joe Frazier on March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden, what would become known as "The Fight of the Century." Kinunen said he acquired the garment, which is autographed by Ali, when a storage locker belonging to the boxer's loyal cornerman, Drew "Bundini" Brown, went up for auction.

What makes this robe stand a cut above others featured in Kinunen's collection? Its color is a good place to start.

Ali, who entered the match undefeated, famously ditched his trademark black and white ring attire for what he called, "A red and white king's robe" in a March 4, 1971, New York Times story. After he was defeated by Frazier in a 15-round unanimous decision, the robe was permanently removed from his pre-fight rotation.

"That's the story of the comeback," Kinunen said. "Was he going to quit? Or was he going to find it in him to regain the World Heavyweight Championship again, which he did."

When assessing the robe's value, Kinunen compared it to a jersey worn by the late Kobe Bryant during his rookie season with the Los Angeles Lakers (1996-97) that sold for $2.7 million in June. The collector argued his piece is more rare considering its tie to one of Ali's five loses over the course of his career.

"Those guys played 82 games a year," Kinunen said of Bryant and other NBA players with coveted memorabilia. "Muhammad Ali had 61 professional fights ... and there's not a robe for every fight. So the opportunity to get something that was worn by him in the ring for one of his fights is really, really miniscule."

The second of Kinunen's most-prized possessions is also connected to an Ali-Frazier fight, but its significance transcends the ring. It's a Muslim prayer cap the boxer was gifted during his visit to the Philippines in 1975 for a bout that became known as the "Thrilla in Manila."

"It's truly a work of art," said Kinunen, who acquired the cap from the personal collection of the boxer's assistant equipment manager, Wali Muhammad. "I can't imagine the hundreds of hours that must have went into making it."

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According to Kinunen, Ali gave the cap to Muhammad, a fellow Muslim who, according to biographer Thomas Hauser, also served as an assistant minister to Malcolm X at the Nation of Islam mosque in Harlem, after defeating Frazier for the second and final time of his career.

“After the fourteenth round, Ali came back to the corner and told us, 'Cut ‘em off.' That’s how tired he was. He wanted us to cut his gloves off," Muhammad told Hauser in a 2010 story for The Sweet Science. "(Trainer) Angelo (Dundee) ignored him. He started wiping Ali’s face, getting him ready for the 15th round. We sponged him down, and I gave him a drink of sweetened water — honey and water — from a bottle I’d made up. I don’t know if he’d have gone out for the last round or not. Ali’s not a quitter; he’d never quit. But I’d never seen him exhausted like that before."

Kinunen said the cap and other artifacts from Ali's career were unearthed from Muhammad's modest apartment after he lost a lengthy battle with cancer and died in 2012.

"He had a ringside view of Muhammad Ali's entire career, all the ups and downs, and he thought enough to hold onto that prayer cap. That meant a lot to him," Kinunen said. "He didn't have a lot of the robes; he didn't have a lot of gloves; he didn't have a lot of trunks; but he kept that prayer cap, so he knew how important that was being that it was gifted to him during 'The Thrilla in Manila.'"

The opening bid on the cap is $250,000, but it's one of the pieces from the collection Kinunen considers "priceless."

"That's a piece that needs to be on the world stage," he said.

'The people's collection'

The last time Kinunen crossed paths with "The Greatest" was in 2005, when he traveled to Louisville for the grand opening of the Muhammad Ali Center.

Before catching a flight back to Wisconsin, Kinunen said he saw the wheelchair-bound Ali arrive in the same airport terminal for his trip home to Michigan. According to Kinunen, Ali and company were taken into a private room while they waited on their flight, and joining them in the room was Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre.

A crowd, understandably, began to form outside as fellow travelers clamored to meet the two sports heroes. Only the "very frail" Ali, Kinunen said, granted them access into the room.

"These people come out crying or laughing or smiling or they have an autograph, and this went on for like an hour and a half," Kinunen said. "So even in his, literally in his dying days when he's wracked with Parkinson's, he won't stop giving himself (and) accommodating his fans as much as he could. And the contrast was Brett Favre was sitting there with the door locked ignoring the same fans that had the same adulation for him."

Kinunen said he went back and forth for a year before decided to put his Ali collection up for auction, and the decision was in part inspired by the Louisville icon's giving nature.

"He was The People’s Champion, and this is the people’s collection," Kinunen told Heritage Auctions. "These things need to go back to the world, to the institutions and museums and people who appreciate Muhammad Ali as much as I did."

Until bidding ends Friday, where these artifacts end up remains a mystery.

A spokesperson for the Muhammad Ali Center said its collections and archives team is aware of the auction taking place, but as a nonprofit it relies primarily on items being donated from those who were closest to the boxer and members of the community.

Perhaps a connection with Kinunen can be forged, though. When asked about his relationship with the center, the collector said, "We'll make sure that, if there's anything that I can do to help them get a piece, I'll be glad to do it.

Reach recruiting and trending sports reporter Brooks Holton at bholton@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @brooksHolton.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Massive collection of Muhammad Ali memorabilia hits the auction block