Max Ortiz/The Detroit News The Kronk Center in southwest Detroit where the famous Kronk Gym is housed in the basement. The gym was named for a former city councilman in what had once been an all-Polish neighborhood.

Part 2 -- Hardscrabble beginning

    Steward’s drive to succeed and the seeds of Kronk’s remarkable ascent to glory had the rudest of beginnings. They sprang from the hardscrabble mountains of West Virginia in 1952, when an 8-year-old boy received a pair of boxing gloves for Christmas from his coal-miner father.

    For the next three years, little Emanuel Steward fought illegal, unsanctioned bouts against other miners’ sons, as rough-dressed men held a ring rope around them with one hand and made bets with the other.

    At age 11, his parents divorced, and Steward moved to Detroit with his mother and two sisters. “Sonny,” as he was called, made a reputation first as a street fighter, then trained more formally at a local Catholic Youth Organization and the city’s Brewster Recreation Center, winning the Detroit Parks and Recreation junior tournament in 1959 and ‘60, then the local Golden Gloves title in ‘61. Two years later he won the national Golden Gloves 118-pound championship.

    The only backing he could find to launch a pro career would have meant moving to California, however, so Steward opted to stay in Detroit, marry the former Marie Steele, and go to work for Detroit Edison as a construction electrician, occasionally training boxers on the side.

    In 1969, Steward’s kid brother, James, came up from West Virginia to live with him and his wife.

    When James expressed an interest in boxing, Steward began training him after work each day in the nearest ring he could find — at the Kronk Recreation Center, owned by the City of Detroit.

    James won the local Golden Gloves title, and other kids came knocking on Kronk’s door, asking Steward to train them.

Part 3 -- Formula for the future