Boxing trainer Emanuel Steward dead at 68
Emanuel Steward (owner of Detroit’s legendary Kronk Gym and a standout trainer for boxers including Thomas Hearns, Evander Holyfield and Oscar De La Hoya) died Thursday. He was 68.
Victoria Kirton (Mr. Steward’s executive assistant) said Mr. Steward died at a Chicago hospital. She did not disclose the cause of death.
Mr. Steward trained, helped train or managed some of the greatest fighters of the past 40 years out of the Kronk, a dingy, overheated basement gym that produced world champions like Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard and Lennox Lewis.
Mr. Steward, who was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, worked closely with current heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko as recently as July.
Mr. Steward also worked since 2001 as a boxing analyst for HBO.
Emanuel Steward.
Hall of Fame boxing trainer Emanuel Steward, who directed several world-champion fighters including Thomas Hearns, Lennox Lewis and current heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, has died. He was 68.
Steward’s executive assistant (Victoria Kirton) said the trainer died Thursday at a Chicago hospital. Steward’s family has not disclosed the cause.
The personable Steward was one of his sport’s greatest resources and had served as a television analyst for HBO’s most significant fights since 2001.
According to the boxing statistician company CompuBox, Steward trained 41 world champions, and his heavyweights accumulated a remarkable record of 34-2-1 in title fights.
“The depth of his knowledge was unsurpassed” – said HBO’s lead boxing announcer, Jim Lampley. “He was just as involved in amateur boxing as he was professional, so almost every time we’d start covering an American fighter, Emanuel had seen him at the start.”
HBO Sports President Ken Hershman said the network feels an “enormous degree of sadness and loss… Ten bells do not seem enough to mourn his passing.”
Steward, who eventually owned the gym, trained more than 30 world champions there and elsewhere, among them Julio Cesar Chavez, a six-time world champion in three different weight classes; Oscar De La Hoya, who won 10 world titles in six classes; the former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks; and, most recently, Klitschko, the reigning heavyweight champion.
Among Steward’s crowning achievements as a trainer were Holyfield’s upset of Riddick Bowe to regain the world heavyweight title in 1993 and Lewis’s eighth-round knockout of Mike Tyson in 2002 for the heavyweight crown.
Steward was also a longtime commentator for HBO Sports.
A genial, fatherly presence in a sport not known for soft speech, Steward had an eye for up-and-coming fighters and a Balanchinian skill at molding movement.
“I keep things simple, and I give everybody their own individuality” – Steward told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis in 2007. “You never see all my fighters fight the same way. I find the best punches and movements that are the most natural for the coordination of their body types.”
Steward was by his own account as interested in what made a fighter tick outside the ring as in it. He typically visited boxers in their homes or took them to live in his. If he determined that they were not eating well enough, he cooked for them.