Lonnie Ali, the widow of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, has sold the couple’s 81-acre estate on the St. Joseph River in Berrien Springs, Michigan for $2.5 million.
Ali bought the estate in the mid-1970s for $400,000, having just moved from the South Side of Chicago. Although he would go on to move again to Los Angeles and then to Arizona, Ali continued to use the estate as a boxing retreat, according to The Chicago Tribune.
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The estate includes a roughly 4,000-square-feet Cape Cod style main house along with seven other buildings on the property, namely a gym with a boxing ring, a carriage house, a bath house, two climate-controlled garages and two original barns.
Lonnie Ali, who resides in Arizona, initially listed the estate for sale in June 2018 for $2,895,037, which was a nod to Ali’s 37 knockouts in his career. The southwest Michigan house eventually was sold on Dec. 21.
Listing agent Tim Mitchell of Cressy & Everett Real Estate told Elite Street, there was plenty of interest in the property, including a car collector in Barrington and possible buyers from Indonesia and Dubai. Ultimately, the house was purchased by the New York City-based Turken Foundation, a nonprofit educational foundation that was established in 2014 by Turkey’s two major foundations.
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“I think the buyers kind of fell in love with the location and the nostalgia,” Mitchell said, according to The Chicago Tribune. “I don’t know that they know yet what they’re going to do with it. Lonnie Ali was one of the best sellers I ever worked with, and she was very happy with the outcome, and I was, too.”
The estate also features a mile of river frontage, a full-length basketball court, an outdoor kitchen with appliances and grills under a barreled rooftop, a pergola, a gazebo, a fire pit, gardens and a waterfall rock garden.