AMSTERDAM, Netherlands-This is a boxing story told in three rounds. Blood, sweat and tears will fall, yet as in all good stories, the underdog wins in the end.
Round One: In 2009, a group of sledgehammer-tough Belgians formed a boxing club in the upstairs of a two-story building on a narrow cobblestone street in Brussels.
Their opponents were despair and hopelessness. Unemployment in the city then was as destructive as it is today: nearly 40 percent for young people.
Their vision was clear. Get kids boxing, they said to one another, which would help their too-small confidence grow. Then we'll teach them how to speak well, hold their heads high and write a resume so employment can put their life back together.
American Gym, they called the club, in honor of a Brussels actor who found unusual success and in recognition of the place he found it. The actor?
"Jean-Claude Van Damme," said Daniel Beum.
Beum is a former pro boxer and World League Football Player (right guard, New York New Jersey Knights). Along with Jamel Bahki, Beum is the club's boxing trainer, while Michael Robert teaches job skills.
"The most important thing is that they become autonomous," said Robert. "We cannot save them. Boxing brings them the tools to save themselves."
The odds aren't good, because on this cobblestoned corner of Brussels, life often feels like a black-eye boxing match.
Round Two: Doors open and kids - cautiously, as if cornered - arrive at the gym.
One day, an immigrant from Uganda walks through the door. Unemployed, with a wrecked marriage and two children to support, Spike, as he's known, has nowhere else to turn.
There are Spikes in every city of the world, including Chattanooga. The downtrodden, with their fists balled up, seem to take punch after punch from a punishing world. Spike's story is their story, and if the American Gym is to help anyone, it must help Spike.
Round Three: Spike completes his
training and lands a job. But it's not long before he's late to work. Again and again.
One more mistake away from being fired, Spike is confronted by Beum, Robert and Bahki.
"He was in revolt against society, and we wanted to work with him on one more chance," said Beum.
And it works. As if waking up from a nightmare, Spike transforms himself into a new man. On time for the rest of his program, he becomes the story Beum, Robert and Bahki love to tell.
"He is fantastic, one of the best employees in the group," said Beum. "It was his spirit test."
I'm 11 days into a five-city tour of Europe. Traveling with me are 19 other Americans - incredibly smart, talented and generous Americans - as part of the German Marshall Fund, which grants to its Fellows a tour of Europe as a way to improve trans-Atlantic relationships.
We've been on the streets, in the parliaments, boardrooms and bars: Memories start to stick like bumper stickers on the backs of traveling VW vans.
In Brussels, American Fellows watched the streets come to a midnight standstill as Moroccans poured out of bars in celebration after beating Algeria in a soccer - excuse me - football game.
We toured the European Parliament, had dinner with a leader of the European Union and discussed the ethics of torture, Libyan intervention and cyber-warfare with a leader of NATO. A day later, a leader in Amnesty International refuted much of what the EU and NATO officials had said.
In Amsterdam, we toured the city by bicycle, where I'm told the brownies here are a heck of a lot different than what Little Debbie bakes. Here, legal marijuana is sold as easily as Happy Meals.
But the similarities are much greater than the differences. The American Gym shares the same mission as the Westside Boxing Club on Central Avenue in Chattanooga. Westside is run by Andy Smith and also uses boxing to help transform people's lives.
Without such work, we face the possibility of nightmares. It was one afternoon in Amsterdam when I fully understood this.
I had just stepped behind a three-shelf bookcase on hinges at the end of a long hallway to climb 14 wooden stairs so steep I thought I would fall backward and so emotionally powerful my heart was pounding like it wanted out of my chest.
They led to an attic. Tacked to the old yellowed wallpaper walls were pictures of movie stars and strawberry vines. An attic window looked out on the street below. Still scratched on the walls were the pencil lines marking the height of two growing children.
Their names were Anne and Margot Frank.
David Cook can be reached at davidcook@blumail.org.