It is getting on for three years since I first got to know Gerry Willmott.

A former Metropolitan Police boxing champion in his late 50s, Willmott opened the Haringey Police Community Amateur Boxing Club in 1999, on a site adjacent to the White Hart Lane ground of Tottenham Hotspur, the Premier League football club. He wanted, he told me, to give local kids in the North London borough something to keep them out of trouble. He described himself to me as "an old-fashioned policeman from the 1970s – I'm here to stop kids doing wrong".

The club – a hive of no-nonsense, sweat-soaked industry on the occasions I visited - struck me at once as a shining example of how sport can be harnessed to make a positive impact on society.

Willmott introduced me to his club captain, Kingsley Okolie, a powerfully-built middleweight with a flashing smile, who had boxed more than 40 opponents. As a teenager, Okolie had been, in his own words, a "violent thug" who roved the capital with his gang administering contract beatings at £100 ($163/€116) a go for anyone with a grievance.

You can read my original story about Okolie and how Willmott and his gym helped him to turn his life around here.

Given the riots that broke out last week in Tottenham before spreading across London and to other English urban centres, it is worth highlighting once again how Okolie said he and his friends justified their behaviour.

"I didn't see anything wrong with it," he told me. "As far as I was concerned, that was life. You did what you could get away with ...

"We could get things other people in our class couldn't have. It was respect. We were just being hard men ...

"That was more important than anything else. At the time, you don't give a damn about your victims."

Under the circumstances, it seemed only fitting to get back in touch with Willmott, so I telephoned him this weekend. Thankfully, the club – whose rent is paid for by Spurs – had survived the riots unscathed, although a shop opposite hadn't.

"It was disappointing to see," Willmott, who was born in Tottenham, told me. "It started off outside the police station ...

"It deteriorated into criminality. It's such a shame."

I was appalled to learn, given last week's violence and the positive impact the club had been having, that its funding had been slashed. According to Willmott, cuts to money that used to be received from the local council and the police had reduced the club to the "bare bones".

"We can't do our summer schemes," he said. "The opportunities for lads to travel around have been severely reduced."

Now it might seem to some that council-funded weekend trips for inner-city kids to go and box in Liverpool or Birmingham are a luxury that the country can no longer afford. But it will be interesting to compare the cost of those with the price tag for cleaning up after last week's madness. Plus there is an educational/cultural dimension that no accountant will ever quantify.

As Willmott put it: "If we are, say, driving to Liverpool, they are amazed there is so much countryside – because they've never been there. They have just seen it on telly."

As Premier League football matches kicked off across the country, marking the start of the new season, but not in Tottenham, whose game against Everton had been postponed, Willmott gave vent to a sense of resignation that will strike a chord with those involved with grassroots sport far beyond Britain.

"That's the stupid thing," he said. "At times like this when it's all about getting kids off the streets, the money they are cutting is affecting our ability to do that."

Willmott is not aware of anyone connected with the gym getting involved in last week's incidents, although he says he will be making enquiries next week. Nonetheless, I ask him if the riots have shaken his faith in sport's ability to help keep kids out of trouble. The answer is No.

"You can't help everybody," he says. "You can try your best and work with the ones that want to be helped.

"I will keep doing my bit to teach them right from wrong and give them an alternative."

No-one pretends that it is easy: four times Okolie "derailed" before definitively changing his ways. That adds up to a lot of man hours. But the value of individuals like him - who are prepared to get up and tell young people with great articulacy, in language they can relate to, why crime is not a smart choice - is incalculable. As he said to me, "It's not like I read it in a book."

All told, Willmott estimates, the club has suffered £30-£35,000 ($49-$57,000/€34-40,000) a year in lost funding compared with the position two or three years ago. That probably seems a lot if you are struggling to get by without a job in one of the scuzzier neighbourhoods of Haringey. But in the grand scheme of things, with Britain in the latter stages of a multi-billion pound sports spending binge triggered by the London 2012 Olympics, it really is a drop in the ocean.

Willmott (pictured far left) expresses the hope that it might be a "blessing in disguise" that the rioting started in Tottenham because it should make it easier to make a case for that area being treated as a priority. He may be right, but it really shouldn't come to that. If experienced, streetwise individuals such as Willmott are prepared to devote hours of their lives to using sport to help keep disadvantaged kids out of trouble, our society ought to be giving them all the help they need.

If that much-abused term "Olympic legacy" is to count for anything, then it ought to be that.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here