Hit Man - Brian Hughes [7]
3 THE KRONK
IT WOULD NOT be glib to suggest that Emanuel Steward was the father figure Tommy Hearns never had. It was a role he fulfilled for many youngsters who shuffled through the doors of his sweatbox gymnasium in one of the roughest areas of one of the roughest cities in the USA, and Hearns himself would say Steward was “like a daddy.” Their partnership would become one of the most successful in boxing.
Emanuel Steward was born on the 7 July 1944, in Welch, West Virginia, the first child to coal miner Manuel Steward and his wife Catherine. He would later be joined by his sisters Diana and Lavern. He was a small child but robust and energetic, and enjoyed a happy, outdoorsy childhood, picking strawberries in the hills and fishing in the creek. At the age of eight, Emanuel was given boxing gloves as a Christmas present and fell in love with the sport. His dad taught him the basics and he soon spent every spare moment throwing punches.
At the age of eleven, however, little Manny’s happy youth was marred when his parents divorced. In a journey that would be repeated by Lois Hearns ten years later, his mother took him and his sisters from West Virginia to Detroit to begin a new life in the Motor City. “I’ll never forget that long, lonely ride,” said Steward of their train journey. “We left on Friday and it rained the whole trip. We got to Detroit on a Saturday evening. I thought it was the end of the world – not knowing that it was the beginning of a new life.”
Catherine found employment in a small factory. Eager to assume the mantle of the family’s senior male and to help with the finances, Emanuel also worked in a variety of odd jobs. He delivered newspapers and groceries before school and used his holidays to work as a garden landscaper and ice-cream salesman. In 1958, at the age of fourteen, he also joined the Brewster Recreation Center, where the great Joe Louis had learned to box. The stalwart coaches, Jimmy Myland and Festus Trice, taught Steward the fundamentals of the sport, and everything about the gym, from the smell of liniment to the rat-a-tat of the speedballs, fascinated him. He approached boxing with the same dedication he had shown to his family finances and, fighting as Little Sonny Steward and later as Sonny Boy Steward, he quickly won consecutive Detroit Parks and Recreation Junior Tournament championships in 1959 and 1960. A smooth, sharp counter-hitter, he set his long-term sights on turning professional in order to support his family, and moved to the Lasky Recreation Center, where he came under the tutelage of Bill O’Brien. This precipitated further success and in 1961 he won the Detroit Golden Gloves title.
A year later, he travelled to Chicago to represent his city in the National Tournament of Champions. This was his first trip outside of Michigan and his first experience of staying in a hotel and dining in a restaurant. When he returned to Detroit, he viewed his neighbourhood through different eyes and felt that there was a better world for him and his family. His determination was further strengthened that he would work hard to give them a better standard of living. When he graduated as an honour student in the springtime of 1962, a local politician named Coleman Young, later to become the first black mayor of Detroit, helped the budding boxing star get a full-time job in a small plant which supplied motor parts.
During this time, when combining his familial duties with boxing, Steward was unexpectedly bitten by the coaching bug, which would come to shape his whole life and define the future success which he dreamed about. He had started to date