Tonight in Madison Square Garden, while Lennox Lewis and Michael Grant circle each other like two wary glaciers, Emanuel Steward's brain will be the fastest moving machine in the house.

Fastest and best equipped. When you talk about boxing and you think about the old school of boxing values, Steward stands out as one of the few giants of the game, cut from the same cloth as the legends. In a business which he describes as "low and unfaithful", he is respected and revered.

His status within the boxing world reveals itself in all sorts of ways. At the press conferences designed specifically for hype and ballyhoo, he is consistently deferred to as the eminence grise, and somehow his presence has a calming effect.

His assessments of fighters - his own and their rivals - are usually fair and thoughtful and never involve phrases like "this time it's personal" or "we gonna git you sucka". For this his opinion carries a lot of weight. Then there is his curriculum vitae.

Steward brings Lennox Lewis, the most gentle, cerebral heavyweight in memory, to the party tonight, merely the latest in a long line of champions and challengers whose edge has been brightened on the whetting stone of Steward's experience.

The range of his talents as a trainer is such that he has tutored a disparate range of talents, from Lewis through to Thomas Hearns, Milt McCrory, Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar De La Hoya and Naseem Hamed.

The complete list of fighters who at some stage or other have passed through Steward's hands reads like a nominations list for a boxing hall of fame.

The Kronk Gym, where he has coached for 30 years and which he still runs, has become a Detroit institution and a boxing university. Stuck out in the decaying southwest corner of the city, and named after a local politician, the gym has grown from the freezing-in-winter, hell-in-summer haunt of the average gymrat to being a landmark in itself, selling its own line of merchandised clothing and deferring in decision-making to a corporate headquarters elsewhere in the city.

The original gym is now the works floor of a large and thriving business with its own logos, management structure and branch offices in the form of other Kronk gyms which have opened in other cities.

Steward's story has a made-for-TV movie quota of boxing moments. The Professor Emeritus of pro boxing was reared in a coal town in West Virginia, until his parents divorced when he was 11 and he moved with his mother to Detroit.

By then Emanuel Steward was deeply in love with boxing, having been given a pair of Jack Dempsey gloves for his eighth birthday. He had his first bout soon afterwards: Steward had been getting into trouble around town, and a group of men put Steward and another delinquent in a ring with bets riding on their backs. Through all the whaling rawness, Steward survived.

He fought like that till he moved to Detroit, whereupon he visited a gym for the first time and put the finishing touches to a style that would make him a Golden Gloves champion.

He stills talks about being taken to Chicago for a boxing tournament at the age of 14 and realising that there was another world out there besides the grinding poverty of inner-city Detroit. By 17 he was training local kids, and, aside from a three-year break from boxing when he worked as an electrician (among other things), he has been teaching the ring trade ever since.

In many ways the champions and the money have been incidental to the kids and the teaching. When Prince Naseem Hamed upped and left Brendan Ingle's gym in Wincobank, Sheffield, he knew what he was doing when he fled to the arms of Steward, whose social work reflects many of the characteristics of Ingle's. His life has taken on the quality of a vocation. He flirted with bankruptcy several times in the early days, when he was mainly coaching juniors, and for a while in the 1970s had to sell life insurance to keep the gym afloat. He found himself with a large gym filled with talented kids and selling life insurance policies and working nixers as an electrician just to keep them in gear. Today he will spend most of the day alone, working up to a level of concentration and an intensity which any of his fighters would envy. He visualises in precisely the same way as an athlete does, only he takes it further, working through every eventuality and scenario his imagination can summon.

"Lennox has his job and I have mine. I have to see for him, see the things he can't see, see what is happening next. If this happens and that happens, I have to know what will happen next. That's what my lifetime has gone into."

He reckons he'll be doing it till he dies - not moving amidst this great caravan of hype and dishonesty, but working in the gym, training kids, knocking the raw edges off them. When he thinks of the Kronk Gym and its gallery of champions and its designer sweatsuits, it's still the kids which make him proud, still the kids which keep him interested.