EIGHT

APRIL 15, 1985

Tommy Hearns loses to Marvin Hagler, but Detroit remains America’s preeminent boxing city in the 1980s, thanks to the legendary entrepreneur Emanuel Steward and his storied Kronk Gym—a beacon of success in an otherwise grim economic landscape. In the aftermath of a nasty post-game riot, the Tigers lose their luster.

As the fight started, “Marvelous Marvin” Hagler strode straight up to Tommy “Hit Man” Hearns and lashed out with a huge right hook. From that point on, it was clear that the fight would live up to the hype—even Muhammad Ali and Bo Derek were in the audience. As usual, the promoters had let everybody know that the two men hated each other passionately, but they always do, after all. This time, it might have been true. For three minutes straight, they stood toe-to-toe and traded punches with furious abandon. Here is how the Detroit Free Press opened its description of the first round: “From the opening bell he [Hearns] and Hagler began to tear at each other as if each blow, each breath, might be their last.”1

The second round was less ferocious, as Hearns tried to box rather than slug. Hagler, though, continued with the full-frontal approach, and by the end of the round, he had Hearns backed up against the ropes. The judges’ scorecards showed a small lead for Hagler, as they did after the first round. About a minute into the third round, a Hearns punch enlarged the cut on Hagler’s forehead, and the blood flowed so copiously that the referee temporarily halted the fight to allow Hagler’s doctor to inspect him. Hagler insisted he was ready to fight on, the doctor said “the cut’s not bothering his sight,” and so the referee let them go at it again—Hagler later said he found the injury motivating. But he also knew that time was running out. If this went on much longer, the cut would start gushing again, and the blood loss would make it impossible to fight. He advanced toward Hearns and punched and punched and punched until he had pummeled Hearns onto the ropes. Another swing with his right, and Hearns began to lose his balance. As the man tried to right himself, Hagler ran up to catch him and hit him hard, three times in a row. Unable to defend himself, Hearns rolled off the ropes and onto the floor of the ring. As the referee counted, Hearns struggled up once more, but he was clearly out on his feet.

The Boxer of the Year 1984 was defeated, and the fight, also known as “The War,” was over. Afterward, Richard Steele, the referee, said the opening round had “the most action of any first round in any fight I have seen.”2 The Ring declared it the fight of the year, and some even consider it the greatest fight ever.³ When it was over, it emerged that Hearns had broken a bone in his hand in the flurry of exchanges in the first round; to his credit, he never tried to use this as an excuse. Emanuel Steward, his trainer and manager, said that “it was a more physical fight than we wanted and before the first round had ended I sensed trouble ahead.”⁴ Others were more critical of Hearns’s strategy, and one wrote: “Tommy fought the wrong fight. He should have started cautiously, lose the first couple of rounds. Don’t get into a dogfight, but that’s what he did. He got into a dogfight with Marvin and he lost.”⁵

Tommy Hearns was born in Tennessee. His mother moved the family to Detroit when he was ten years old, at a time when the city’s industrial future still held promise. By the end of the 1960s, optimism had turned to despair. Living on Helen Street and attending school on the East Side of Detroit, Hearns had to navigate gangs, drugs, and rising gun violence. But from early on, the young Hearns believed he had what it took to make it to the top of a sport for which Detroit was famous: boxing.⁶

When the era of Muhammad Ali ended, some feared that boxing was dying out, particularly since the media were expanding their coverage of the NFL and the NBA dramatically. In addition, the dangers of boxing were becoming all too clear; the old idea that boxing was a fine sport to build young men’s character was fading fast. In the 1980s, however, four fighters arrived on the scene to prompt a boxing renaissance: Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and Thomas Hearns. These four, boxing in the welterweight and middleweight divisions, fought with such ferocity that they attracted larger and larger audiences. A series of fights between 1980 and 1989 demonstrated how well matched they were. Duran, the eldest of the quartet, defeated Leonard in their first fight in 1980, but he lost the two rematches and also lost to Hagler and Hearns. Leonard, arguably the greatest of the four, beat Hagler and Hearns, but a rematch with Hearns resulted in a draw, while Hagler beat Hearns in their only match in 1985. Most of these matches were close, and many are remembered as among the greatest fights in history. Once they became crowd-pleasers, they also made more money than any boxers had made before them.

It’s not easy to place Hearns in the hierarchy of boxing. His defeats usually came in close fights, which are widely considered classics. In an era of multiple world titles, he held five over his career, a record at the time. Yet he never overcame Leonard or Hagler. To his Detroit fans, he was without question among the all-time greats, and throughout his career he was a loyal Detroiter: twenty-seven of his sixty-three professional fights were hosted in the city. He did not much like his nickname “The Hitman,” which all too uncomfortably evoked Detroit’s sky-high murder rate at the time. Understandably, Mayor Coleman Young, who took a close interest in Detroit’s boxing success, was not crazy about that image, either. Hearns himself preferred his alternative nom de guerre, the “Motor City Cobra.”7

Once Hearns became rich, he followed what is by now the wellestablished trend among the well-to-do and moved out to the suburbs, into a luxury home in Southfield, a city on the northwest corner of Detroit that borders Eight Mile Road. When he got grief about leaving the city behind, he revealed, in 1984, that he had been working in Detroit as a police reserve officer, going out on patrol as often as three nights per week. His partner praised his ability to defuse conflicts by telling tales from the ring.⁸ Without question, Hearns was a hero in the tough black neighborhoods of the city, but his fortunes fell. He ended up in trouble with the IRS—an event so common in his line of work it almost goes without saying. Faced with a tax bill of $448,000 in 2010, he was forced to sell off many of his personal possessions, including a 1957 Chevy, three boats, and all his boxing memorabilia.⁹ As of 2019, he still lives in Detroit, though his street patrols days may be over.

For many years, Tommy Hearns was the most important boxer trained and managed by Emanuel Steward, who saw himself both as the father figure Hearns never had as a kid and as Hearns’s most important asset. At times, Steward would claim, modestly, that “I am blessed with Tommy,” and at other times, less modestly, that “I made Tommy Hearns.”10 The question of who made whom would one day bring their partnership to an end, but by that time they had both risen to be acknowledged masters of the fight game.

Emanuel Steward emerged from the gyms of the city to make Detroit the preeminent boxing city in the United States in the 1980s. Born in West Virginia, he came to Detroit in 1955.¹¹ Trained at the Brewster Recreation Center, where Joe Louis once boxed, he was an outstanding amateur boxer and actually won a national Golden Gloves award in 1963 at bantamweight. He thought about going pro but decided he could better provide for his family by learning a trade as an electrical engineer.

Coaching part-time for a while, he eventually started working at the Kronk Gym. The Kronk was located on the West Side, at 5555 McGraw Avenue, in what had once been a Polish enclave. Named for the Polish councilman who had lobbied for it, the gym was built in 1922 to provide the opportunity for physical exercise and to help keep young Detroiters out of trouble. In 1971, Steward trained a team of seven boxers—and when they won every bout in the Detroit Golden Gloves tournament, people started to sit up and take notice. The following year, he resigned his engineering job with Detroit Edison to become a full-time boxing trainer. By 1974, he had two amateur national champions.

Hearns is probably the greatest of all the boxers Steward nurtured from amateur to pro, but the list of successful Kronk boxers is a very long one indeed. By the end of the 1980s, the gym had produced two Olympic gold medalists and five world champions. First came Hilmer Kenty from Ohio, who won the World Boxing Association’s lightweight title in February 1980. Next, Steve McCrory and Frank Tate, both born in Detroit, who won gold medals at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles (in, respectively, the flyweight and light middleweight classes). Then came Milton McCrory, younger brother of Steve, who was the World Boxing Council’s welterweight champion between 1983 and 1985. Last, two more Detroiters: Jimmy Paul (International Boxing Federation lightweight champion from 1985 to 1986) and Duane Thomas (WBC light middleweight champion, 1986–87).

By the 1980s stories about the Kronk Gym had turned into veritable legends. Steward tried to maintain a stable of thirty to sixty boxers at any one time, and he often bragged that there were more contenders for world titles in his gym than in the rest of the world combined. Training sessions were intense, located in a cramped basement where the temperature was maintained at a stifling 80–90 degrees. Stuart Kirschenbaum, who served as Michigan’s boxing commissioner between 1981 and 1992, marvels that Steward “turned boxing into a team sport” in Detroit. Wearing one of the colorful Kronk jackets marked you as a serious contender, he remembers, but Steward was more than a local celebrity—he was a world figure, Kirschenbaum stresses.

Kirschenbaum, an amateur boxer from New York, came to Detroit at the end of the 1960s. He became a major player in the Detroit boxing scene, all while maintaining a podiatry practice. He still practices in a building next door to the iconic Fisher Building in midtown Detroit, where we visited him to listen to his stories: how he found Joe Louis’s widow, Martha Louis, in a nursing home in a Detroit suburb, penniless, and became her guardian. About his friend Muhammad Ali, who owned a house on the western side of the state and was frequently seen at Detroit boxing venues. The saddest of his stories is a story of death, fire, and destruction: in April 2013, a former maintenance worker showed up at the Park Medical Centers where Kirschenbaum’s practice was located. Myron Williams was looking for Sharita Williams, who had broken off their relationship. A few hours later, Sharita and Myron Williams were dead in a murder suicide, and the building was engulfed in flames.

The heartache over the young woman’s death eclipses another loss from the fire: a vast collection of Joe Louis memorabilia Kirschenbaum had built over more than a decade. In his office, Kirschenbaum walks to a sideboard and pulls out a plastic bag. Inside is one of the few things that survived the fire: one of Joe Louis’s gloves, bronzed. It is in bad shape, and as he pulls it out to show it to us, it crumbles some more. Kirschenbaum flinches, then shrugs, like a man who has lost his trust in conservation. “When Emanuel Steward died, boxing died in Detroit,” he says.

For all his love of boxing, Steward was a businessman. His key inspiration was the motivational speaker Glenn Turner, who exhorted his clients to “dare to be great.”12 Steward had run a cosmetics distributorship named “House of Escot,” which was operated by Glenn Turner’s company, Koscot Interplanetary Inc. In 1977, Turner went to prison for seven years, guilty of running a pyramid scheme. Steward had moved on to boxing, but he never forgot to “dare to be great.” He was a generous man, too, who frequently helped out his boxers financially when they got into trouble. Even though Steward’s record as a businessman is mixed—he had a tendency to over-extend himself in his ambition to create a sprawling organization—pretty much every product of the Kronk Gym testified to Steward’s extraordinary motivational skills. And it was his genius as a trainer that that made him a fortune.

As the fame of the Kronk spread, the ever-entrepreneurial Steward expanded, setting up Kronk Gyms in Tucson, California, London, and Belfast. By the early 1990s, he and Hearns had fallen out over money, and many other Kronk boxers deserted him. He went on to become a hired gun, selected by boxers such as Lennox Lewis and Naseem Hamed to act as their personal trainer. By the 2000s, he was also working as a commentator for boxing matches on TV. All the while, he kept the original Kronk Gym in Detroit running.

In a city that had fallen on hard times, the success of the Kronk meant a lot. Having risen to the very top of his game, Steward became a symbol of what black businessmen could achieve in the 1980s, despite the tremendous odds against them. To this day, the entrenched myth that African Americans lack entrepreneurial drive or skills harms black businesses in the United States.¹³ In 2018, a group of researchers published the results of a “mystery shopper” experiment that sent six African American and five white men to seventeen banks, ostensibly to seek small business loans—all wore a blue collared shirt and khakis, all presented near-identical business profiles—although the black testers were made to seem a bit better off than the white ones—and all asked for $60,000–$70,000 to expand their operations. The result? Banks were twice as likely to offer the white testers help with loan applications, and three times as likely to invite follow-up appointments with the white entrepreneurs than with the better-situated black ones. They asked the black ones for more documentation, presented them with intrusive questions about their private lives, and were less likely to thank them for making an appointment.14

Such practices shed light on the divergence between the immense success of black athletes and their too-frequent failure to subsequently move into senior management. Athletic talent is beyond dispute—LeBron James can demonstrate his superiority in five minutes on the court, to everybody’s assured satisfaction. Nobody becomes an elite athlete without tremendous ability, discipline, and willpower, but success in management or business depends not just on performance, but on perceptions, expectations, prejudices, stereotypes, fears. Prowess on the field or in the ring can be objectively measured; quality performance in business and management is not just hard to measure, it is often difficult even to observe. Emanuel Steward’s product, however, was athletes—and nobody could argue with the stable of talent he produced.

Steward was deeply beloved in Detroit. In his autobiography the Irish boxer Andy Lee, whom Steward lured to Kronk Gym in 2003, recounts both the generosity of his mentor and his universal acclaim in the city. Lee himself became one of the preeminent boxers at the Kronk in that decade, and he speaks with awe about Steward, the gym, and Detroit: “I love this city, love its proud people, but it has always been a place of extremes … but I never feel unwelcome or unsafe in Detroit.” Of Steward he writes, “He is incredibly generous, with his time and with his knowledge. I watch him for days on end dealing with top promoters and high-powered lawyers, in person and on the phone, and then the next day he’s every bit as comfortable stopping and chatting to a homeless person back in Detroit, giving them as much of his time if not more. Generous too, often to a fault, with his money.”¹⁵

At the time of the Hagler-Hearns fight, the Tigers were 5-0 for the season. They were also World Champions, having won their fourth World Series in 1984. That season would be remembered for the team’s extraordinary start, racing to 35-5, the best start to the first quarter of the season in the history of Major League Baseball. With pitching ace Jack Morris backed up by Dan Petry, and the local batting tyro Kirk Gibson already in place, the Tigers had shrewdly traded for pitcher Guillerme “Willie” Hernández during the season. A team historically known for its power batting and lame pitching had one of its strongest-ever pitching line-ups. In the postseason they swept the Kansas City Royals, and in the World Series disposed of the San Diego Padres in five games.

There is a sense that the 1984 Tigers who won the fourth World Series for Detroit were not celebrated as joyously as the 1968 Tigers who won the third. Individuals on the 1984 team may have been much beloved—notably Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, who played together on the Tigers for nineteen seasons, the longest double-play partnership in the history of baseball. But the win itself, while of course a source of pride and joy, did not inspire the same enthusiasm. The historical context is probably a part of that: the 1968 team pulled the city together after the harrowing events of 1967, even if just for a few days. However much Detroit enjoyed the success of the 1984 Tigers, the team did not create the same sense of community. By 1984 the city was black and the suburbs were white—Whitaker (black) and Trammell (white) might show what teamwork could do, but political cooperation at the city and county level was much harder to come by.

The subsequent behavior of Tom Monaghan didn’t help either. After winning a World Series in his first full season in charge, he waged an aggressive campaign to ditch Tiger Stadium and build a new one at public expense. When this plan failed, he claimed to have had enough with material things and offloaded the team to the next pizza mogul.

The aftermath of the final game of the 1984 World Series was an embarrassment to the city. As fans left Tiger Stadium and mingled with the crowds that had gathered outside, a police car was overturned. By the end of the evening, one man was dead and one hundred injured. Three rapes were reported. Headlines such as “Motown Madness” and “World Series Rampage” added to the lawless image of Detroit. The most famous photograph of that World Series did not involve a home run or strikeout, but a drunk seventeen-year-old kid dancing for the TV cameras in front of a burning car. Three years later saw the release of the film Robocop, which portrayed Detroit as a violent, dystopian sinkhole.

Emanuel Steward passed away from cancer in 2012. Aretha Franklin sang at the funeral, Tommy Hearns broke down crying. Sugar Ray Leonard, Wladimir Klitschko, Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield were among the mourners.16 His family tried to keep the gym going and maintain his legacy, but vandalism caused the original Kronk site to be closed in 2006. A new site was opened a few years later, at 9520 Mettetal, about six miles further west, and is still in operation as of this writing. Various plans were developed to rebuild the gym on its old site, and some funds were even raised. But at the end of 2017 it was mysteriously burned to the ground and was finally demolished at the end of 2018.

Kirschenbaum says the sport is finished.¹⁷ He speaks with the authority of a man who has spoken funeral orations at the graveside of too many fighters who have died young because of too many blows to the head. All his life he has loved the sport, but now he sees that it is coming to an end, and he is not sorry. Of all sports, this is the one evoking the most conflicted emotions—its violence is repulsive, its management exceptionally corrupt. But there is a purity in the personal duel of the boxing match. It is not a game for fools, and chess champions have often expressed a sense of shared struggle with boxers. Like chess, it is hard to blame defeat on luck, and so victory, when it comes, is total—but so, of course, is defeat. Detroit, which has seen its share of both, has always had an affinity with boxing, and earlier this decade, there’s been talk of reviving Detroit as a “production line of great fighters,” in keeping with its history as one of the sport’s premier U.S. sites.¹⁸ But the time when Detroit boxers were household names is over. Boxing itself is dying, largely surpassed by mixed martial arts, or MMA. It’s hard not to conclude that the demolition of the Kronk marked the last rites of one of Detroit’s most successful sports.