The Detroit News Olympic Gold medalist Steve McCrory, left, and Rickey Womack shake hands in Emanuel Steward’s limousine after both signed professional contracts with Kronk gym. McCrory died last August. Womack is training again after two terms in prison.

Part 2 -- Boxing good to fighters

    “Boxing saved most of us — it saved me, made me a man,” said Bilal Ajani Sekou, 41, who fought under the name Joe Manley, winning a world junior welterweight title and two national amateur championships. His teammates who came to tragic ends, he said, “went against everything they ever learned in boxing. It wasn’t boxing at all that made them go wrong.”

    No one interviewed by The Detroit News pointed a finger of blame at Steward.

    “Emanuel Steward is a good trainer and a good man,” said legendary boxing figure Angelo Dundee of Miami Beach. “He works for his fighters. That’s why we’re friends — we’re of one ilk, we’re there for the fighters.”

    Said Jester: “I thank Emanuel Steward ... all the time for involvement in my life. I very much could be one of those in jail, or on drugs, or dead. Instead, I won two national titles. I’ve traveled all over the world.”

    The star-crossed Kronk saga begins in the 1970s when Steward, a former amateur boxing champion, began training Golden Gloves boxers out of Kronk gym inside a city-owned recreation center on McGraw at Junction. Soon promising boxers from all over Detroit were making their way to his gym, named for John Kronk, a city councilman in what had once been an all-Polish area. Kronk was a member of the first city council in 1919 and served off and on until his death in 1954.

Part 3 -- Kids showed potential