Photos by Max Ortiz/The Detroit News Rickey Womack, who started boxing at the Kronk gym at age 13, ended up going to prison at age 17 for armed robbery. Now 39, his is out of prison for the second time, training to fight again.

Tragedy stalks Kronk

Violent death, prison follow some of Detroit’s finest boxers

Steve McCrory

By Fred Girard / The Detroit News

    DETROIT — The little Kronk gym on Detroit’s battered southwest side spawned more than 50 amateur champions, more than 120 titles, three Olympic gold medalists, and established a boxing dynasty whose fame would spread worldwide.

    Twenty-seven of those boxers went on to the pros under the tutelage of Hall Fame trainer Emanuel Steward, winning 40 world championships and more than $150 million in prize money.

    But there is another Kronk Boxing Club story.

    It is a story told by an unmarked grave in a closed city cemetery, final resting place of Bernard “Superbad” Mays, one of the greatest fighters in Kronk history, who died at 33, penniless and alcoholic.

    It is a story told in a west side Detroit church last August, when mourners wept as world champion boxer Milton McCrory knelt by the casket of his kid brother, Olympic champion Steve McCrory, who pawned his gold medal and wasted away in poverty from an undisclosed illness.

    It is a story told in the killing of Duane Thomas, former world super-welterweight champion, shot to death last summer on a graffiti-covered Detroit sidewalk in a small-time drug dispute.

    Boxing traditionally has been a way off the streets and out of poverty for many. However, the temptations it can attract and hard-knock personal backgrounds have taken a chilling toll on Kronk fighters.

    Tragedy and misfortune — ranging from prison terms, to murder and drug addiction — have touched a third of the original 61 Kronk boxers Steward built into a world powerhouse in the 1970s and ‘80s, mystifying boxing experts even as they marvel at the Detroit club’s accomplishments.

Kelly Kimbrough kneels at the headstone of her boyfriend, boxer Steve McCrory who died last August at age 36 of an undisclosed illness.

    No other boxing club in the nation has had a similar experience, leading boxing archivist and historian Gabe Kaplan to conclude that the “tough streets” of Detroit bear a share of the blame.

    “A lot of these kids are born and raised in poverty, in and around tough streets, some may have had the benefit of teachings from parents, and others may not have,” he said. “They were never able to pull out of that environment even though they found some success as athletes. They got into jackpots of trouble, and never met their potential.”

    Rick Jester, who fought for Kronk, said don’t look for scapegoats in boxing or Steward, the son of a West Virginia coal miner who is now perhaps the most coveted boxing trainer in the world.

    “You cannot go around drinking alcohol and smoking drugs, doing all these negatives, to make a positive,” said Jester, 43, now a master plumber with the Detroit public school system. “Some got caught up in society, allowing society to dictate to them instead of taking their teaching from the fight game.”

    Yet 38 of the original Kronk team members who came from or settled in Detroit made their own luck, and today are middle-class working people, teachers and hospital workers, cops and insurance agents, meter readers and plant foremen, engineers and firefighters. Three of them are wealthy, most notably six-time world champion Thomas Hearns.

Part 2 -- Boxing good to fighters