In his absence, some Detroit friends entered. Steward left Hearns’ side briefly in the pre-fight training room to tend to some errands. Hearns gained another mega-bout against Marvin Hagler. Hearns was leading on all three judges’ score cards when Leonard launched a stirring rally that concluded with a 14th-round technical knockout. The next year Hearns, who developed under Steward’s hand from scrawny “Motor City Cobra” to “Hitman,” battled Sugar Ray Leonard in a highly anticipated super-fight. In 1980, Hilmer Kenty became Steward’s first champion. “His favorite quote was, ‘Who would’ve thought I’d leave West Virginia to find a gym for troubled, inner-city kids in Detroit and train an Irish middleweight, Andy Lee, and a Ukrainian heavyweight, Klitschko?’” Lampley said. He gravitated to training at Detroit’s Kronk Gym, a location he would later build into one of the world’s best-known boxing centers, where international title contenders flock to train shoulder to shoulder with kids off the street whom Steward would lavish with boxing knowledge and even financial support. Steward was a Golden Gloves champion, but his family’s need for financial support led him to sacrifice a professional career for work as an electrical lineman. He worked on auto industry assembly lines as a teenager and trained to fight at Brewster Recreation Center, where former heavyweight champion Joe Louis worked out and legendary Eddie Futch trained. Steward was born July 7, 1944, and moved from his native West Virginia to Detroit in the 1950s with his mother after she divorced his coal-miner father.
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