Associated Press
Kronk’s Duane Thomas leaps for joy after defeating John “The Beast” Mugabi during their WBC Super Welterweight title fight in December 1986. Last year, Thomas was shot to death in a drug dispute.
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Part 3 -- Kids showed potential
One of the earliest was a sweet-faced 11-year-old named Bernard Mays, who already could outbox kids years older.
Jacque Farmer, a trainer at another city recreation center, had come across a group of kids he thought showed enormous potential, and sent them all to Steward. From one single block on Marx Street, a north-end neighborhood two long bus routes away from Kronk, came two sets of brothers — Stevie and Milton McCrory and Jimmy and Danny Paul, and Duane Thomas. All but Danny Paul would go on to win titles.
“Four world champions from one block — we had a very competitive block,” Milton McCrory said in a recent interview. “But we all took care of each other.”
The nucleus was complete when Thomas Hearns and his brothers, Billy and John, joined the team, and Kronk started the 1980s as the preeminent amateur boxing club in the nation.
The camaraderie lasted until Rickey Womack, a neighborhood kid who started boxing at Kronk in 1974 as a 13-year-old, became the team’s first member to turn to crime.
Womack went to prison at age 17, sentenced to two to 15 years for armed robbery. He got out in 1981 and was treated like a son by Steward and his wife, living with them as he trained at Kronk.
Suddenly, teammates’ possessions began disappearing. On a trip to Tokyo shortly after his release from prison, Womack picked up a watch and walked out of the store in full view of the manager. Boxers Mark Breland and Stevie McCrory, who were with him, were detained by police until Steward got them out.
Womack turned pro in 1984, signing a contract with Steward and ESPN guaranteeing him $150,000 over two years. He lived rent-free in one of Steward’s Detroit properties, equipped with a 26-inch color television, VCR, microwave oven, dishwasher and washer-dryer.
Womack was 9-0 as a professional at Christmastime 1985 when he walked into a Redford Township video store, pistol-whipped the female clerk with his 9mm handgun, and walked out with a few hundred dollars and a handful of tapes. Two weeks later he tried to rob another video store in the same suburb, but panicked when a customer walked in. Womack shot him and ran. Police found Womack’s car keys on the counter and his wallet on the front seat of a beige Volvo — a car Steward had given him — parked outside.
The customer lived, so Womack was sentenced only to one count of assault to murder and two of armed robbery, receiving three 12-to-25-year sentences plus two years for using a gun in a felony.
Now 39, Womack was released from prison last fall. He is training to fight again — but not at Kronk.
He freely admits being Kronk’s first bad seed. “I sowed that, and I reaped incarceration,” he said. “I can’t blame anything on my environment, on Detroit; and I certainly can’t say anything bad about Emanuel Steward — he’s a wonderful man. I was a foolish, ignorant, impulsive young man.”
After Womack, the Kronk team was never the same. The world was changing outside the gym as well, as the crack cocaine scourge became an epidemic in Detroit.
“There were the new hard-core druggies from the east side who followed Tommy Hearns everywhere, guys from the Mafia, the biggest gamblers ...,” Emanuel Steward said. “That’s why Las Vegas loved to have our fights. They knew if it was Kronk, it would be a big-money night. All these people would charter planes from Detroit and come out — that’s all you’d see for the first three rows.”
Eric Williams, part of the original group that came to Kronk from Lasky and Jacque Farmer, said the money and good times came too quickly.
“There was so much success, so much money at the beginning, nobody ever believed anything could go wrong,” said Williams, who now trains fighters in Atlanta. “The money was coming in hand over fist, and people were spending it just as fast.”
Part 4 -- Success spoiled things
