Emanuel Steward Dies at 68; Trainer of Boxing Champions

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.

He even tried to confer a sartorial advantage on his fighters. When Lewis first came to him, one of the changes Steward made immediately was to jettison the black shoes he wore in the ring.

“You can’t feel quick in black shoes,” Steward told The Orange County Register in 2000.

Emanuel Steward was born on July 7, 1944, in Bottom Creek, W. Va., and began boxing at 8 after receiving a pair of Jack Dempsey gloves for Christmas. When he was about 11, his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother and sisters to Detroit.

Fighting as a bantamweight, Steward compiled a 94-3 record as an amateur boxer, winning the national Golden Gloves championship in 1963. He was considered a contender for the 1964 Olympic team, but, needing to support his family, he left boxing and became an electrician for Detroit Edison.

Then, in the early 1970s, Steward’s teenage half-brother, James, came from West Virginia to live with him. James wanted to box, and the two of them found their way to Kronk, where James became Emanuel’s first disciple.

Soon other fighters were coming to the gym to train with Steward, and before long he was driving the Kronk team to bouts around the country. Those were lean years: Steward once had to sell his watch to buy gasoline.

His illustrious stable — the trainer gets a percentage of the fighter’s purse — would eventually make him wealthy. Over time, Steward owned Rolls-Royces, a Lincoln and a Jaguar. (In 1998, he was obliged to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $1 million in back taxes, penalties and interest.)

Steward’s marriage to Marie Steele ended in divorce. Besides Ruiz, the executive director of the Kronk Gym Foundation, his survivors include two daughters, Sylvette Steward and Sylvia Steward; and two sisters, Diane Steward-Jones and Laverne Steward.

The Kronk Gym closed in 2006; Steward continued training fighters elsewhere in Detroit.

Steward, who was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1996, appears to have retained his eye for talent to the end. As Steward-Jones told The Detroit Free Press on Thursday, he spent much of his recent hospital stay trying to sign the male nurses he encountered there to fight for him.