By Ann Miller
Advertiser Staff Writer

You hear "boxer," you think big and brutal. You meet Brian Viloria - possibly the best United States hope for boxing gold at the Olympics - and you are shocked by his petite proportions and innate gentleness.

Viloria is the nephew you pat on top of the head and the prom date your parents want to meet.

"He’s so cute - pictures don’t do him justice," said Marisa Yagi at one of Viloria’s last benefit functions. "I’d like to adopt him. I don’t like boxing, I just wanted to come and support him. He was so unaffected.

"I wanted to shake him and tell him, ‘Don’t you know you’re going for the gold medal?’ He’s such a nice, Hawai‘i boy, straight from Waipahu."

He just happens to pack a punch so potent that the precise instrument that measures such power at the Olympic Training Center couldn’t cope.

Viloria, the team’s smallest boxer at 106 pounds, hit the heavy bag harder than anyone in the first eight weight classes (up to 156 pounds). The machine, fed by electric sensors, maxed out at 674; coaches figured Viloria was in the 700s.

"It’s leverage," USA coach Tom Mustin said. "The way he turns his body, the way he pivots and rotates his hips."

Viloria, who has called boxing a "ballet," disagrees: "I always felt God gave me power to punch the way I do."

Viloria hardly has the look - made famous by boxing’s heavyweights - of a well-chiseled warrior. His body gets lost in Olympic sweats. At the photo shoot for Sports Illustrated, which will feature him in its Olympic edition, he was painted gold. In full pose, he resembles a statue of a child.

To boldly go . . .

He is our child, Hawai‘i’s greatest hope for a medal, and our first Olympic boxer since 1956. Viloria is profoundly aware of all that means, and the realization humbles him.

Simultaneously, it ignites the competitive fire that made him a world champion a year ago and has pushed him to a 24-5 record internationally, the most prolific on the U.S. team.

"It’s just my drive," Viloria says. "I’ve always wanted to go somewhere others couldn’t go. I wanted to make history. I was the first from Hawai‘i to win a national title. That made me feel that even a small kid from Waipahu can make a name for himself. All the kids in the world could be looking at me."

All the world might be looking. NBC and MSNBC will showcase Viloria during the Games. Newspapers from Boston (The Globe) and San Francisco (Asian Weekly), and points between, have featured him. He has been on Sports Ticker and in the SI, ESPN and Men’s Journal magazines. Adidas is running a Viloria print ad, and he’s hit the Web in a big way.

That’s since April.

It has been a whirlwind not unlike his first fight, when he went in the ring "eyes closed, fists flying" and came out a winner. He was 9. A year earlier, "overwhelmed" by what he saw at the 1988 Games, he first dreamed of the Olympics.

"From the first moment, there was something unusual about him," says his father Ben, who taught Brian to box to keep his younger, bigger brother Gaylord from picking on him. "The basics I was teaching him, he took to it like that. I gave him the patterns and he did it like I told him. And he moved. He had the ability to move and hit and he always had that power, the inner power."

Once a tennis champion

Viloria was 16, and held two junior national championships, before he lost his first fight. He quit, became the Leeward District tennis champion, and eased back into boxing, winning his first fight in the second round.

In that instant, Viloria recalls, "all the passion came back." In his international debut, he lost to Cuba’s Maikro Romero, the 1996 Olympic flyweight champion, at the 1998 Goodwill Games. He dropped Romero last year to win the world championship.

"It was a learning process," Ben says. "After he lost, Brian told me, that guy over there is just like me. Next time I meet him, I’m going to beat him. ‘There you go,’ I said. He learned self-confidence."

In the long process, Viloria believes he has also learned to navigate the fine line between self-confidence and talking smack. He enjoys pre-fight hype, taking on Puerto Rico’s Ivan Calderon in a men’s magazine and Cuban coach Alcides Sagarra last month.

When Sagarra claimed his team would win all 12 gold medals in Sydney, Viloria’s response came with a wink. "That’s impossible," he said. "We’re expecting to win 12 gold medals."

The "Hawaiian Punch," who recently came to a family party wearing a cap with straggly gray hair and fake, foul-looking teeth, is doing his best to thrive under the Olympic microscope.

"I don’t let it get to my head," Viloria says. "I make it fun for myself. I’m having the time of my life, taking it a day at a time and trying to get the most I can out of what I’m doing now.

"I have to have fun. I am really happy with where I am right now. Any opportunity, I have to take. They are opening a lot of doors out there, and I love it. I love to travel, meet all the interesting people. I don’t want to let any day pass me by."

Enjoying every moment

It has been one day at a time for many years. When he was little, Viloria worked out for hours. When he graduated, he followed his passion 4,700 miles to Northern Michigan University, to train with 1996 Olympic coach Al Mitchell at the U.S. Olympic Education Center.

The cost for free tuition and training was, Viloria says grimly, "11 months of snow a year." He put up a poster of a beach scene at sunset and stared until his body warmed to his dream.

Viloria is 2 1/2 years short of his degree in broadcast journalism. Finishing his education will be written into any pro contract he considers when the Olympics end, Ben says. But for now, Brian can concentrate on his dream, as it comes true.

"I really want to relax," Viloria says, "because I know I’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ I’ll be real nervous. When I see all the flags being waved and the opening ceremonies and all the atmosphere from different parts of the world, and all the best athletes in the world, I will be nervous.

"I just want to go in there and do what I have to do. Try to make it as small as possible. If I blow it up into too big a thing, it will make me real crazy. I’ll try to take it one day at a time, don’t overlook anybody and, most of all, have fun. Enjoy every moment."