Kronk Gym Returns to Detroit

Although perennial heavyweight champion Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis had positioned Detroit as one of the nation’s boxing capitals in the late 1930s, a half-century later another boxer brought the city a different kind of boxing fame.

Emanuel Steward, a former national Golden Gloves bantamweight champion, would go on to become a coach, a mentor, and finally owner of Kronk Gym, where he produced Olympic medalists and professional champions.

Young aspiring fighters and well-known seasoned pros clamored to be trained and managed by Steward, who started working at the gym in 1969 as a part-time assistant boxing coach. He was known in some circles as the “godfather of Detroit boxing” even before his 1996 induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. While he passed away over a decade ago, his legacy continues today with the newly announced revival of his gym, passing the torch to the next generation.

Steward’s first two professional champions were crowned in 1980, when Hilmer Kenty won a lightweight world title and, a few months later, his prize pupil Tommy Hearns captured a welterweight title. Three years earlier, under Steward’s tutelage, Hearns had won the national Golden Gloves light welterweight title just before turning pro.

Known as the “Hitman” and the “Motor City Cobra,” Hearns became Kronk’s “crown jewel” when he made history in becoming the first fighter to win championships in five different weight classes.

Steward trained and managed numerous famous boxers while producing 41 world champions. Besides Hearns and Kenty, they included Milton McCrory, Lennox Lewis, Michael Moorer, and Wladimir Klitschko, to name just a few.

In 2006, when the city began closing recreation centers due to financial woes, the Kronk boxing program moved out of its 1921 building, which was shuttered following the vandalism of wiring and copper pipes.

Vacant for a decade, the original Kronk Recreation Center was demolished the year after a suspicious 2017 fire mostly destroyed the structure. Meanwhile, the Kronk boxing program had moved to Warren Avenue, its location until Steward’s passing at age 68 in 2012 after a short illness, and then to Mettetal Street, where it finally closed during the COVID-19 pandemic after a destructive flood. A nonprofit youth boxing program has been allowed to use the Kronk name at a facility in Westland.

This past March, it was announced that under new ownership, the Kronk organization, with the continued involvement of Marie Steward (Emanuel’s widow) and Sylvia Steward-Williams (Emanuel’s daughter), a new Kronk Gym will open in “the heart of the city,” according to the press release, and will involve “many of Kronk’s former world champions and fighters that trained under Steward.”

Although details on the exact location and new facility were not revealed in the March announcement, Kronk managing partner John Lepak told Hour Detroit in a phone interview that it “will be very close to the other Detroit sports franchises in the heart of the city, at a historical location within an existing building that will be renovated.”

Lepak trained as a young boxer at Kronk beginning in 1987 and later became an assistant and office manager for Steward.

“Speaking as someone who grew up with Emanuel Steward being a mentor, as he was to so many others, it is a tremendous honor to help carry his legacy forward both inside the ring [and] to the community and boxing fans around the world,” Lepak said.

Recently, the new Kronk ownership signed its first professional fighter, Hunter Lee from Windsor, Ontario, whose lead trainer is Theo “Third” Chambers, a Steward protégé.

Besides hopefully training new boxing champions, the new Kronk ownership says it will be “very active in several community programs, youth mentorship initiatives, and training opportunities for the youth of metro Detroit.”

Hilmer Kenty, who moved from Ohio to Detroit in 1977 when he turned pro, was named Kronk’s ambassador. He will represent Kronk at events and in the media and engage with aspiring boxers and business initiatives “to preserve and grow our legacy,” Kenty said in a phone interview.

“I think Detroit has the best boxers in the world, and if we put together a good program where guys can fight on a consistent basis, we’re going to turn out champions just like Emanuel Steward did,” Kenty said. He added, “But the life of a boxer in the ring is only so long, so you have to prepare that boxer for life after boxing. That is very important and something Emanuel did so extremely well. He prepared us as young men.”

This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on May 5.