KRONK Gym

Well, just in time for Detroit's upcoming birthday, the legendary Kronk Jim is sponsoring a massive boxing revival here to tell us all about it this morning. William from Kronk Jim. Welcome. Welcome. So this is the first official return of Kronk's boxing team to a national competition. Tell me how exciting is that? This is extremely exciting to come back out here and be able to showcase ourselves. It's amazing. I'm excited to be here and be able to represent the team. And you do represent the team as the captain, correct? And your story is really an interesting one. You started boxing at age seven. Tell me about that. And where did you get that? Like at age seven, you know, most folks are like maybe put together some Legos. You're like, I just want to go out and beat somebody up. What's going on? Honestly, for me personally, the drive to want to box came from the incarceration of my father. He was incarcerated when I was when I was eight. And that kind of really pushed me to box more. I had a lot of frustration, a lot of anger that a child at my age really, I couldn't process. So going into boxing, that was a release for me was able to just go in there and let my emotions out. And it helped me a lot. Just it was therapy for me. So how did chronic specifically help you? How did you decide to? I know you said it was your dad was incarcerated. How did you get to that point where you said, you know, I need to channel this and go to a gym and maybe put this into a professional state. I got to that point, honestly, just through the help of my mother. She's one of those moms. This whatever she can do, she can do it. She's never she's gonna she put me into every absolute every sport that she possibly could just to make sure that I could get the experience and things like that. And then boxing was just that one. It really stuck for me. It helped me the most out of any of those activities that she put me in. What was it about boxing? Was it the discipline that your mom rightly, you know, cheer channeled your energy into? Was that what it was? Definitely. I would say for sure to discipline the schedule. A lot of a lot of it for me was just the consistency with boxing. Boxing was all year around. It gave me something to do rather than being at home sitting in the room constantly just thinking, thinking, thinking boxing was able to give me something else to do with my time. So you're 78 years old. You're in this particular. How did you balance it with school and maybe friends that were like, man, you're going back over there again and missing out on things. How did you balance that? Um, honestly, it was it was at that age. It was really simple for me. Now, as I'm getting older, I find it a bit more difficult. But at that age, it was way, way simple. I go to school in the morning time. I train in the afternoons and a lot of a lot of times because my age, I went to school. It didn't even know about. It was just something that I did. It was just just my happy place. I didn't want to involve anyone else. So as the leader of this now see, do you see others coming up that were like you that you're like, you know, man, I was I was in that position. Let me help you. Are you giving your wisdom to those stories like this? I can name about four or five different kids in the gym right now. That reminds me of me. We all are growing up in the same neighborhoods. We're coming from a lot of the same circumstances. So I see kids that come to the gym all the time that are just like me. We have active fighters who will be competing soon who remind me so much of myself. So I definitely try my best to work with them in the gym, pass on any knowledge I can. They're open and they know that they can talk to me whenever they have the whenever they feel like it. So I just, I'm just there for them as much as I can be. And it seems like that's important just to be seen and to know that somebody understands the journey that you went through. You're doing that for these other other folks that are coming up. You gotta say how to make you feel good. Definitely. Definitely. I want to be a role model for them just so I've had some great role models growing up, my coaches, people like that. So I just want to be able to be a role model for them as well. So what makes this team ready in your opinion? It's been a little while since you guys have been on the international tournament under your leadership. Now they're ready. What makes them ready? The drive, just how badly that everyone wants it. Everybody has been in the gym training consistently for months on months on end and they want it and unlike anything else. So they want to get out there and get out there. They want to win. So when you see these young men that are out there thinking about competition, thinking about competing, putting their skill sets to work, how does that make you feel as they are representing us? Chronix has had some amazing folks coming out of there and you in your own leadership role are one of those. You could have others in your team that you have mentored take that same route. Yeah, no, definitely we could. Um, I just with the team and them getting ready to train, taking that, can you ask that question one more time for me? No worries at all. I'm just asking you, how do you feel about knowing that there's been a lot of superstars that have come out of proms? You're, you could potentially be leading those or you could be one yourself as a mentor. That's a weight on my shoulders for sure. Just to the gym has produced 41 world champions. So just to be in the gym with that amount of history, there's not a gym in this country that can can honestly match up to that. There's a trainer, Emmanuel Stewart. The foundation that he said is it was excellent just to be able to be a representation of that. It's just it's amazing. So is this something that we'll be able to see when they go to box when you tell us how we can see this national tournament? Um, or how soon is it coming out? It is. So we have to two competitions coming up. We have one on the 25th of this month and then we have the fifth. That is the national tournament as king of the jungle. So our fighters will be going there with the help of people like happy pizza will be sponsoring us. So they're able to send us out here. We're gonna go down to Grand Rapids and we're gonna go compete and being the fight should be live streamed as well. I believe if not, then you have to wait we will find out about that because we will put a link on our website at Fox City Detroit dot com. And also if you just want to help these young men up, help crocs boxing team. You can also always go to croc dot com and again we'll put that link on our website. Young man, thank you so much for all that you are doing. We'll be right back.