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Aloha, Sydney! Hawaiian leads U.S. Olympic boxing team
Posted: Thursday March 02, 2000 02:45 PM By L. Jon Wertheim
Last summer USA Boxing put its fighters through a battery of tests to assess their strengths. In one test, sensors were attached to a heavy bag to measure the force of the boxers' punches. Among boxers in the eight lowest weight classes, the highest score was registered by the smallest fighter, 106-pound Brian Viloria. "My teammates couldn't believe it," says Viloria, a 19-year-old native of Waipahu, Hawaii, whose soft voice and wispy mustache belie his toughness. "Then they saw on slow motion how I turn my hips." Slow motion is not a phrase often heard in reference to Viloria, who is as fast as he is powerful. Last Thursday night at the U.S. Olympic Box-offs in Mashantucket, Conn., Viloria -- whose nickname, predictably, is Hawaiian Punch -- dominated Karoz Norman of St. Louis with stinging jabs and body blows to win 19-5 and sew up the light flyweight berth on the U.S. Olympic team. "I've sparred with him a hundred times," said a frustrated Norman, "but I still can't get over his quickness." Viloria roared into Mashantucket as the winner of his weight class in last month's Olympic trials. The Box-offs pitted each of the 12 winners from the trials against a challenger determined through a losers' bracket; the trials champ had only to win once in two matches to make the team. Now, to earn a spot in Sydney, the Box-offs winners still must compete in the Americas Olympic Qualifiers this spring. (Cuba, ranked No. 1 after the '96 Games, was the only country from the region with an automatic berth at each weight.) That process should be a mere formality for this U.S. squad (chart, right), which observers are calling the strongest in more than a decade. "People will compare this team to '76 and '84," says Gary Toney, president of USA Boxing. "We're stacked with talented boxers." Perhaps none more so than Viloria, who learned to box when he was six and sharpened his skills when his younger brother, Gaylord, now a 250-pound high school football player, started pushing him around. By 16 Brian had exhausted the local competition and was venturing to the mainland to train. A 1999 world champion, he enrolled at Northern Michigan to join the same program that spawned five other fighters in the Box-offs. The program, he says, was invaluable, but with snowdrifts up to his head, the climate was an adjustment. No Hawaiian boxer has made an Olympic team since 1956. Viloria has taken this semester off to train full time at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs and isn't even returning calls from promoters who want him to turn pro. "I've spent the past 10 years preparing for this," he says, "so it's easy to stay focused.
Issue date: March 6, 2000
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