AMERICA AT LARGE:MOTOWN RECORDS has been headquartered in New York for years now, and the automobile industry that gave the Motor City its name appears determined to beat it out of town as quickly as it can.

The hometown Tigers went into the final month of the baseball season with a 3½ game lead in the American League Central, but among major US cities, Detroit also leads the league in per capita unemployment.

Of course, out-of-work auto workers might consider emigrating to Mexico, where they’d not only have jobs, but government-sponsored health care as well.

Detroit increasingly resembles a ghost town with each passing day, but in the face of a mass exodus, Emanuel Steward and Dave Bing seem determined to be the last men standing.

That thought occurred to me yesterday, first when the mail arrived, bringing the announcement that Steward was planning a VIP benefit for his Kronk Gym Foundation at the Detroit Athletic Club later this month, and then, just hours later, when I came across a photo taken a few days ago of the crumbling shell of Tiger Stadium, in which what remains of that historic ball park looks a bit like Dresden, circa 1944.

Neither man is a Detroit native, and both are wealthy enough that they could have beaten the rats out of town years ago, but Steward and Bing share a deep-set emotional investment in the future of a city that may not, in truth, even have a future.

Steward moved to Detroit as a young man in the late 1960s, and in 1971 took over as a volunteer boxing coach at an inner-city recreational centre named for an obscure Polish-American politician. After building the Kronk Boxing Team into the foremost amateur programme in the country, Steward joined several of his more illustrious graduates when they embarked on professional careers, and before the decade had run its course Hilmer Kenty and Thomas Hearns had become the first of what would be a parade of Steward-trained world champions.

Dave Bing was drafted by the Detroit Pistons, for whom he played all but three years of his 12-season NBA career, after his graduation from Syracuse in 1966. When a local bank denied him a mortgage, he reasoned that if they could turn down a millionaire basketball icon, the city was probably teeming with minority aspirants who’d been similarly spurned. He addressed the situation by going to work for the National Bank of Detroit, eventually rising to run its customer relations and mortgage departments.

From there he went on to found a company tied to the car industry. Bing Steel tuned a $4.2 million profit in its second year of existence. Then, earlier this year, Bing took on a job you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. When mayor Kwame Kilkpatrick, was packed off to the Wayne County Jail, Bing finished first in a 15-man February primary, and then won the run-off election in May to fill the remainder of Kilpatrick’s term as Mayor of Detroit.

Although the Kronk Boxing Team and the Kronk Foundation (Steward copyrighted both names years ago) have remained viable, the old rec centre that gave it its name has lain dormant since 2006. First relocating to a Gold’s Gym in Dearborn and later to its present – and temporary, insists the Hall of Fame trainer – quarters in the suburbs, the Kronk has been a vagabond operation.

Tiger – nee Briggs – Stadium opened in 1912, and until 1999 was the home of the Detroit entry in baseball’s American League. It also hosted several important prize fights, notably Detroit native Joe Louis v Bob Pastor in 1939 and, 10 years later, the middleweight title bout between Jake La Motta and Marcel Cerdan. From 1938 until 1974 it was also the home of the Detroit Lions. Since there were no immediate plans for the property, eight years after the Tigers had relocated to Comerica Park, the vacant shell of Tiger Stadium remained untouched, a white elephant in the midst of a blighted city. There were those who wanted to preserve the park, and it was successfully designated an historical landmark.

Even after razing commenced, there was a plan, spurred by longtime radio announcer Ernie Harwell, to preserve a portion of the grounds – the infield, and the stands from dugout to dugout. Approval for that project was actually granted, but when funds could not be raised to support the restoration, the wrecking ball returned a few months back.

Then a couple of weeks ago, after the edifice had been battered into a twisted mass of concrete and steel, demolition was abruptly halted. The explanation turned out to be that Detroit, having first been unable to raise the funds to save Tiger Stadium, now didn’t even have the money to finish wrecking it.

A similar fate had befallen the Kronk Recreation Centre. In early 2006, neighbourhood thieves broke in and, under cover of darkness, removed the copper pipes that had provided heat. This also reflected the changing character of the neighbourhood that had once provided the constituency of Kronk boxers: Steward’s original charges might have been poor kids from mostly single-parent ghetto homes, but if the teenaged Tommy Hearns had come home with a truckload of pilfered copper pipes, his mother Lois would have used one of them on his backside.

Later that year the city Recreation Department determined that restoring it would be too expensive, and condemned the property, evicting Steward and his boxers – who by then included Limerick’s Andy Lee. Steward has shopped around since, hoping to buy new property for a permanent home but in recent months he has revised his thinking. Now he wants to return the Kronk to, well, to the Kronk.

Although the rec centre was sentenced to death three years ago, “the city didn’t have the money to tear it down,” Steward reported yesterday. “The building, or at least the shell of the building, is still there – although you can stand there now and see all the way to downtown Detroit. They’ve knocked down almost everything in between.” And in his new dream he has an ally in the present mayor.

“Most people don’t even know this, but when Dave Bing first came to town, the Pistons played their home games at Cobo Hall, and their practice facility was the basketball court at the Kronk Recreation Centre,” said Steward. “This was even before we started the boxing programme there, and once we did, Dave and some of the other players used to come by after practice and watch the kids work out.”

Steward’s back-to-the-future vision for the Kronk still faces many obstacles, then, but the mayor isn’t one of them. “He’s all for it,” said Steward of Bing.

That, of course, assumes that Bing will still be in office. In tough economic times, the incumbent is an easy target, and as he stands for election to what would be his first full term, the erstwhile basketball star faces significant opposition. Among Bing’s rivals on the ballot is anther politician with a familiar Detroit name – Tom Barrow, whose first cousin Joseph Barrow used to box under his middle name: Joe Louis.