Photos by Max Ortiz/The Detroit News Emanuel Steward has managed 27 world champions at the Kronk gym, but most important has been his father-like relationship with his boxers.

‘Greatest trainer ever,’ Steward’s legacy grows

Fighters — even Hollywood — seek out his expertise

By Fred Girard / The Detroit News

    DETROIT — A disembodied voice crackles over an intercom, buried somewhere among a jumble of five telephone consoles: “Emanuel, line two, it’s London again.”

    Emanuel Steward, impresario of the Kronk Boxing Club, the greatest champion-factory in the history of the sport, picks up one receiver, then a second, and on the third try finds London on the line for a brief chat about the Kronk branch he has opened there.

    Life is good for Steward, the trainer of 27 world champions, including current heavyweight king Lennox Lewis and featherweight title-holder Prince Naseem Hamed, who have won 40 titles and $150 million in prize money. And of course there’s Thomas Hearns, the skinny Detroit teen-ager whose talent would explode under Steward’s guidance to win six world titles.

    Much like Detroit’s Berry Gordy Jr., who forever transformed the world’s musical landscape in the 1960s and ‘70s with Motown Records and Hitsville USA,

    Steward has redefined the fight game with the Kronk Boxing Club. He continues to build on his legacy as arguably the world’s most successful trainer in boxing history, despite a tragic series of setbacks that have befallen a third of his 61 original Detroit fighters.

    “He’s been an inspiration — he started from scratch, took in these young amateurs, worked with them from day one and took them to world titles.” said Tom Yankello of Pittsburgh, 30, trainer of International Boxing Federation lightweight champ Paul Spadafora.

    Steward, he said, has been “a great influence” on a whole new generation of trainers.”

    The unassuming Steward — the perfect opposite of boxing’s flamboyant promoter Don King — settles back in his leather recliner, in front of a window looking out on a pool and deck furniture behind his house in the fashionable Rosedale Park neighborhood.

Octavio Lara trains at Kronk gym, made famous by Emanuel Steward. Lara hopes to continue the success of boxing at Kronk.

    This house is used as an office — the voice on the intercom belongs to top administrative assistant Lannie Perry in an office suite on the floor above. Steward actually lives in an even lovelier home next door, and owns three others in the northwest side area where for years he put up the best boxers in his stable.

    As he reminisces about his remarkable past, Steward occasionally issues soft-voiced commands to other assistants. One was dispatched to the bank to get him $500 walking-around money, and send money-orders to two of the many boxers he supports; another went to wash and gas his Rolls Royce Corniche, one of two Steward owns, one gold, one red, the Kronk colors.

    Elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1996, Steward now spends at least a third of every year traveling. Last week he was in England for the opening of a new Kronk branch there, flew back to Detroit for only a night, and jetted to a prison in the desert north of Las Vegas to meet actor Wesley Snipes, whom he is training for a role in the upcoming movie Undisputed. Yet, the most important thing about Steward, said boxing patriarch Lou Duva, 78, of New Jersey, is that “all this time he’s been a helluva guy. He’s not just a good trainer, he’s a surrogate father to his boxers. He took them off the streetcorners and taught them how to fight, and he always took care of them and got them started. Emanuel never took a cut of any purse smaller than $10,000.”

    If one out of three Kronk fighters from the championship years came to tragic ends, Duva said, “without Emanuel Steward’s intervention it might have been three out of three.”

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