Subsidizing funerals as a brand strategy?

A couple days after the death of early basketball great George Mikan, a wire-service article reported that Shaquille O’Neal had kindly arranged to pay for Mikan’s funeral. (Like Shaq, Mikan had led a few Laker teams to the NBA title.) This reminded us of the obits earlier this year for boxer Max Schmeling which mentioned that he’d paid years earlier for the funeral of Joe Louis, with whom he split two famous bouts in the 1930s.