One Punch from the Promised Land by John Florio & Ouisie Shapiro

Author:John Florio & Ouisie Shapiro [FLORIO, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762797677
Publisher: Lyons Press

11

DETROIT. WEST SIDE. 1985. AN ASSORTMENT OF FIGHTERS WHACKED heavy bags, speed bags, and trainers’ mitts as sweat dripped off the hems of their signature red-and-gold T-shirts. The heat was cranked to one hundred degrees so the fighters could get loose and stay that way. The dank, low-ceilinged room had the signature smell of ointment and leather; the background score was a percussive patter of gloves hitting canvas, jump ropes smacking linoleum. This was the Kronk Gym, and the brittle, yellowed newspaper clippings tacked to wall-mounted bulletin boards validated its pedigree. Hector Camacho. Julio César Chávez. Thomas Hearns.

The gym occupied the basement of the Kronk Recreation Center, a well-worn graffiti-marred, two-story brick building at Fourteenth and McGraw. Across the street the McGraw Hotel, a fleabag with grime-covered walls and semen-stained mattresses, took in guests by the hour. The surrounding streets were dotted with broken bottles, used condoms, and discarded needles. Had you walked a block in any direction, odds were you would have found a liquor store with security gates or a check-cashing stand with barred windows. Had you walked the same route at night, odds were you would have run into a bullet. Even the boxers left the area before dusk, with the exception of Hearns, who’d built enough local cred that he could park his gold Mercedes on the street and know it wouldn’t be violated.

On the second floor of the rec center, young men ran up and down the muggy basketball court while seniors played Ping-Pong or gin rummy. But it was in the basement, underneath the swimming pool, where the Kronk legend had been built. Its architect, Emanuel Steward, was a savvy boxing trainer who took over the gym in 1971, giving up a five-hundred-dollar-a-week paycheck as a master electrician to earn thirty dollars a week as director of the boxing program. Until his untimely death in 2012, Steward had groomed dozens of champions within the gym’s chipped red and gold walls. By his own count, the onetime Golden Gloves bantamweight champion had managed and trained more than forty world champions and six Olympic gold-medal winners.

On a late winter day in 1985, Steward was overseeing a roomful of boxers, most of them Kronk regulars—young fighters dreaming of taking the title the way Leon Spinks had. One of those hopefuls was Leon himself, now a thirty-one-year-old has-been.

A year earlier Leon had approached local Detroit car dealer Sam Lafata and asked for financial backing to help restart his career; Lafata brought him to meet his friend Steward.

“[Leon] was in a desperate mode,” Lafata recalls. “He needed money and he was very, very serious at the time. He said he wanted to get his life back. I took him over to the Kronk.”

Emanuel Steward said in 2011, “I got involved as a co-manager. Leon was the roughest guy in the ring; the biggest 178-pounder I ever saw. He was an animal. I remember he was fighting a guy at the Olympic trials, All-Army champ, and Leon was so strong that he made the guy almost run.

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