Steward's sad farewell to first of Kronk crew

AMERICA AT LARGE:IF THE Hall of Fame trainer seems burdened with a heavy heart when he arrives in Ireland with Andy Lee this weekend, it is understandable. Few circumstances can be more painful than a man outliving his children. The charter members of the Kronk Boxing Team he founded more than three decades ago might as well have been his sons, and when they laid Mickey Goodwin to rest on Monday, they buried Emanuel Steward's first professional star.

When he established an after-school programme at the dank, inner-city Detroit gym in the early 1970s, Steward spent half a dozen years developing a cadre of mostly ghetto-bred adolescents into the top amateur programme in the United States.

“I always knew they would turn pro eventually, and when they did, I would too,” Steward recalled a few years ago.

On the evening of November 25th, 1977, four Kronk boxers made their professional debuts on a card at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. Among them was 19-year-old Thomas Hearns, who stopped Jerome Hill in two rounds. The main event featured another Kronk teenager, Goodwin, who knocked out Willie Williams in the first round.

In those days the Kronk Gym was located in the midst of an urban jungle considered so dangerous that most white kids were afraid to walk down the street, making Mickey’s presence there an anomaly. Ebullient and wise-cracking, he wore his hair in a tousled mop-top and had a perpetual grin, presenting an aura of civility belied once he stepped between the ropes.

Given the subsequent successes of many of his contemporaries, a mythology has developed holding that Goodwin’s prominence on those early Kronk cards owed as much to his pigmentation as to his fighting ability, since his visible presence would supposedly attract Caucasian boxing fans.

Not so, says Steward. At this stage of their respective careers, Goodwin’s development was probably ahead of Hearns’.

“Mickey was the best natural puncher I ever worked with,” recalled Steward. “The first time he sparred in our gym, he knocked out a kid with the very first punch he threw.”

Between that November debut and the following February, Goodwin and Hearns jointly performed on six shows. Goodwin was the headline act in all of them and five of his fights didn’t get beyond the first round.

Steward had arranged a card for the night of March 17th, 1978. Noting the date coincided with his school’s spring break, the fun-loving Goodwin asked out, and spent the week on a trip with his friends. By default, Hearns got top billing on the St Patrick’s Day show.

“We advertised him as ‘Tommy O’Hearns’,” recalled Steward. “Mickey came back for the next show, but Tommy was always the star after that point.”

Although he regularly sparred with half a dozen team-mates who would become world champions, Goodwin never fought for a world title, though he came close.

In early 1982, Steward had signed a unique, three-bout contract with Bob Arum, who promoted Marvelous Marvin Hagler, which called for the middleweight champion to defend his title against a trio of Kronk boxers – Goodwin, followed by William (Cave Man) Lee and, eventually, Hearns.

Mickey’s challenge to Hagler was supposed to take place that March in San Remo, Italy. But in a sparring session with Lee at the Kronk a few weeks before the scheduled title bout, Goodwin broke his right hand. To keep the television commitment, the date was preserved, but the venue was shifted to Atlantic City and Lee was moved up in the rotation to take Mickey’s place against Hagler.

A few days before that fight in New Jersey, his hand in a plaster cast, Goodwin cheerfully described the new challenger, informing me that “Cave is the only black guy I know who likes rock ’n’ roll and can swim!”

Cave Man lasted but 67 seconds with Marvelous Marvin, and subsequent contractual complications would put off the Hagler-Hearns fight for another three years. Mickey Goodwin never came close to fighting for another title.

His most formidable opponent became the scale. Making 160lb was a struggle, but at barely 5ft 7in he found himself at a distinct disadvantage against the larger light-heavyweights he boxed during the second half of his career. He retired in 1994, with a career record of 40-2-1.

I last ran across Goodwin a year ago in October, when he materialised at ringside in a Michigan hockey rink the night Andy Lee knocked out Marcus Thomas. He told me that in recent years he had, in emulation of the Steward he had known as a young man, been training young amateurs at his River Rouge Boxing Club.

“Mickey was maybe the only boxer out of the original Kronk team who had really gotten involved with the amateur programme, working with those kids in the downriver area,” Steward said last week. “That had become his passion over the last four or five years. He was totally wrapped up in amateur boxing.”

Mickey and I made vague plans to hook up again that night in Plymouth, but we never did.

Teddy Blackburn had been better about keeping in touch. The noted boxing photographer, who grew up in nearby Ann Arbor, recalled a 1981 visit to the Kronk in which he sparred with Goodwin.

“Even though he said we ‘were only going light’, he sent me to the doctor and the dentist that day,” said Blackburn. “He advised me to keep out of the ring and stick to taking pictures. But every time I saw him after that he was always there with a big hug, and I got a Christmas card from him every year.”

Goodwin was 51 when they found his body, early on the morning of March 3rd, at the home he shared with his parents in Melvindale, Michigan. Facial contusions led the small-town cops who were first on the scene to leap to the conclusion that he’d been bludgeoned to death, and for a day that erroneous report circulated all over the globe.

An autopsy undertaken a day later confirmed that, after returning home that night, Mickey had taken a shower just before he suffered a stroke and fell down a flight of stairs.

Confirmation of the actual cause of death didn’t do much to ease the pain of his passing, but it did bring a measure of comfort in answering two questions that had been weighing for the previous 24 hours on the minds of those of us who knew him: (a) Who in the world would want to bludgeon Mickey Goodwin, who hadn’t an enemy in the world?

And (b) Who could?