Have you heard the one about the Mormon and the Muslim?

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but there may no odder couple in recent American political history than Orrin Hatch — the white, rock-ribbed conservative Utah Republican and Mormon — and Muhammad Ali, the most famous boxer ever, African-American icon and Muslim convert.

Yet the two had a friendship that lasted decades, up until Ali's death last week at age 74. Ali's wife, Lonnie, asked Hatch to speak at her husband's funeral Friday in Louisville, Ky., Ali's hometown.

Hatch said he was honored to do it.

"[Ali] helped me by being my friend," Hatch said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. "I have to say that it was one of the great friendships that I've had in my lifetime."

The better you know Hatch, though, the less unlikely his bond with Ali actually becomes. The senator has struck up similarly quirky connections with ideological or political counterparts in the past. He and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy — a liberal Catholic whose personal predilections were utterly unlike those of the teetotaling, non-smoking Utahan — became such close friends that Hatch even wrote a song for the Massachusetts Democrat when Kennedy got remarried in 1992.