While Hagler ticks all the stereotypical boxes for a boxing champ - poverty-stricken ghetto life, father-figure trainer, the ring providing discipline absent elsewhere, etc - Moses came from a family of teachers, where only As and Bs were acceptable, and went to university on an academic - not sporting - scholarship.

He might have been satisfied with his physics degree and engineering job had he failed to qualify for the 1976 Olympics as a 20-year-old, where his period of dominance began - unbeaten for 122 consecutive races, multiple world records. But he knows many in the African-American community, ravaged by drugs and neglect, are not as lucky as he was to have a stable family life and two loving parents.

"I came from a middle-class background, in a middle-class neighbourhood surrounded by [housing] projects," he recalls. "One of the things I remember is that everyone had a mother and a father in the community - and a lot of that changed in the mid-sixties, early '70s and '80s.

"I know for a fact any time you can dissuade kids from doing things that are exciting but dangerous and not good for them, it's a good thing.

"We have [sporting] projects all over the world and I think one of the commonalities of all of them is that a lot of kids don't come from the middle class. They come from backgrounds we just can't believe in the Western world, so they don't even have the chances that I had.

"In many cases, even in the United States, they don't have a parent who's finished high school, definitely not gone to college, so it's very important - but we understand it's not that easy to say you need an education and the kids are going to get it.

"It can have a lot of impact - the clichéd thinking is sports is able to do 'something'; we manage our projects, so we have measureable outputs, so we can tell what's happening with the kids in the projects and we know it's working."

The benefits of sport on impressionable youths can't be underestimated, but seem to have been forgotten by successive governments over the decades, determined to cut costs for the short term with no eye on the long term.

Apart from the obvious health benefits of physical activity, there are incalculable mental and "moral" benefits: inculcating hard work and perseverance, team work, a healthy sense of competition, etc.

Then there's the simple fact that kids in bad areas with nothing to do will often turn to crime simply out of boredom; providing gyms and properly supervised sports programmes is a lot cheaper in the long run than looking after prisoners, but many in power seem not to realise or acknowledge that fact.

In Hong Kong, Operation Breakthrough works primarily with kids from low-income and immigrant families, usually through boxing, helping them engage with the police and keeping them off the streets and out of trouble.

That's something Hagler knows all about, having found his way to the Petronelli gym in Brockton, Massachussetts, shortly after his mother escaped New Jersey with the family, having been traumatised by the five-day Newark Riots that left 26 dead in 1967.

"Boxing's been my life - I walk it, talk it, sleep it and I just don't try to look it," he says, reeling off a well-worn line, "but I think that boxing is what enabled me to be the person I am today ... and also given me the opportunity to help others less fortunate than myself, being able to give something back.

"Being here in Asia and going to this project hopefully you can find one kid out of the whole bunch that might just become another Marvelous, this is what I'm hoping to see, probably pick the kids up and give them the same dreams I had."

Hagler speaks of once seeing schoolchildren pretending to be "Marvelous" in the playground, just as he had pretended to be Muhammad Ali or Floyd Paterson.

With one brother (also a fighter) and four sisters - "if they was boys they would be fighters, too" - all raised by one mother, Hagler's trainer Goody Petronelli and his son became de facto father figures. The importance of positive role models is another aspect Hagler and Moses are keen to stress.

"I think it's important because it's very hard to trust someone today," says the fighter. "The Petronellis were like my father, my brother - I was able to talk to them about anything.

"They prevented me detouring into being bad on the street and they taught me when you start boxing and you start developing a skill you don't take it out on the street and start using it on other people."

Moses adds: "We see sports as an accumulator - we don't use sport to teach someone to become the next Marvelous or the next Edwin Moses or the next Nadia Comaneci, we teach because they're interested, and they'll come because it's fun.

"We take advantage of sport in that, to gain their interest and get them somewhere where they're surrounded by people who'll help in dealing with the social issues."

Moses was kicked off his American football team as a scrawny kid for tackling someone too hard; that sport's loss and track and field's gain. He might have chucked sport in pique then, but explains it was almost impossible not to get involved, such were the number of government-supported projects in the early '60s - all gone now, of course. Among other things it taught him were discipline and determination.

"Four years before the Olympics I was 5-foot 7-inches, 117lbs, I know because one of my classmates gave me the handwritten roster for the football team that year - over the next four years I grew six, seven inches and put on 50 pounds and four years later I was Olympic champion - but I stuck with it a lot longer than people who were a lot better than me.

"No one would have thought, including myself, that I would qualify for the Olympics, but I just stuck with it.

"Back then we had programmes in the summer time when all you had to do was go to a park and there were sponsored programmes. These days in cities like Chicago and LA, parks are sometimes the most dangerous places a kid can go. Today, these kids don't have options."

Charities like Laureus and Operation Breakthrough are providing some of those options; maybe some day governments will wake up to the positive effects sport can have.

Were you listening, Secretary Tsang?