![]() ![]() His life has taken on the quality of a vocation. When Prince Naseem Hamed upped and left Brendan Ingle's gym in Wincobank, Sheffield, he knew what he was doing when he fled to the arms of Steward, whose social work reflects many of the characteristics of Ingle's. In many ways the champions and the money have been incidental to the kids and the teaching. By 17 he was training local kids, and, aside from a three-year break from boxing when he worked as an electrician (among other things), he has been teaching the ring trade ever since. He stills talks about being taken to Chicago for a boxing tournament at the age of 14 and realising that there was another world out there besides the grinding poverty of inner-city Detroit. He fought like that till he moved to Detroit, whereupon he visited a gym for the first time and put the finishing touches to a style that would make him a Golden Gloves champion. Through all the whaling rawness, Steward survived. He had his first bout soon afterwards: Steward had been getting into trouble around town, and a group of men put Steward and another delinquent in a ring with bets riding on their backs. The Professor Emeritus of pro boxing was reared in a coal town in West Virginia, until his parents divorced when he was 11 and he moved with his mother to Detroit.īy then Emanuel Steward was deeply in love with boxing, having been given a pair of Jack Dempsey gloves for his eighth birthday. Steward's story has a made-for-TV movie quota of boxing moments. The original gym is now the works floor of a large and thriving business with its own logos, management structure and branch offices in the form of other Kronk gyms which have opened in other cities. Stuck out in the decaying southwest corner of the city, and named after a local politician, the gym has grown from the freezing-in-winter, hell-in-summer haunt of the average gymrat to being a landmark in itself, selling its own line of merchandised clothing and deferring in decision-making to a corporate headquarters elsewhere in the city. The Kronk Gym, where he has coached for 30 years and which he still runs, has become a Detroit institution and a boxing university. ![]() The complete list of fighters who at some stage or other have passed through Steward's hands reads like a nominations list for a boxing hall of fame. ![]()
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