According to Brian Viloria, tonight’s slate of activities is going to consist of “the same old thing.” For him, that means some time in the gym, some dinner, and maybe hanging out with family or friends.
It should have been so much more.
If all went according to plan, Viloria should have been walking into the ring at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas tonight, laced up and ready to fight for his first world championship against WBC junior flyweight champion Eric Ortiz. It should have been the culmination of four years of hard work in the professional ranks, and the start of a new chapter for the 24-year-old from Hawaii.
But this is boxing, and things rarely go according to plan, so when Lucia Rijker ruptured her Achilles tendon on July 20, scrapping her bout with Christy Martin, Viloria’s long-awaited shot at the title was dumped, along with the rest of the July 30 pay-per-view card, and ‘The Hawaiian Punch’ was thrust back into a familiar posture – that of waiting.
“How much longer do I have to wait for this?” said Viloria (17-0, 11 KOs) when asked of his immediate reaction to the postponement of the Ortiz bout, which will now take place on September 10 at Staples Center in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles. “That’s what’s going through my mind right now. I’ve been preparing so heavily for this coming fight, and I’ve been in the gym the past couple of months, just focusing on what I have to do for this title fight and to have it put off like that, it’s really frustrating.”
2005 has been a year Viloria may want to forget about unless he’s able to beat Ortiz and become a world champion in September. Faced with the usual on again / off again struggles a lot of young contenders go through, Viloria took a fight in May against journeyman Ruben Contreras, and it was your classic “stay busy” bout, one to keep him sharp in a live environment while waiting for his title opportunity.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck that night in Staples Center after a fairly routine bout in which Viloria dominated until Contreras retired in the sixth round, complaining of a headache. Ten minutes later, the 32-year-old from Mexico had a seizure and was rushed into surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain. He was then put into a medically induced coma.
For the affable young man from Waipahu, the blow from Contreras’ injury was the hardest he’s ever had to take, and with it came a lot of sleepless nights, where he wondered if he would ever put on boxing gloves again. Even today, his voice dips when speaking of his gallant foe – who thankfully is alert and recovering from his injuries – and it’s never “my opponent” or “Contreras”, but “Ruben”, making it clear that this is a bond that formed in the most horrific of situations, and one that he will carry with him forever.
But Viloria’s a fighter too, and with the help of family and friends, he’s made it back.
“There’s a lot of praying involved, a lot of just waiting involved in trying to see what his condition was,” he admitted. “But as soon as we got word that he was okay, that he was going to make it through, a lot of the weight came off my shoulders and I was able to say, ‘okay, now I can breathe easy now’, and I don’t have to go to sleep thinking about what’s going to happen to Ruben. Thank God that he made it through that way because if it went the other way, I don’t think I would ever be in this sport again because I don’t think I would be mentally fit to deal with it.”
As it stood, immediately after the fight, Viloria had to think not only about the fate of Ruben Contreras, but about the title fight looming just two months away. After a couple of days spent with family, Viloria made the trip back into the gym, not to work, but to just touch base with his trainers and get away from everything.
It was the best medicine, and once Contreras was out of immediate danger and started to make progress, Brian Viloria got his life back, and after a couple of weeks, he was back sparring and preparing for the fight of his life.
“There was a lot of thinking about why I’m in this sport,” said Viloria, “but everyone contributed to helping me get through it, and as soon as I found out Ruben was going to be okay, I put it into full gear for my world title fight.”
Then the postponement of the fight came down a week and a half ago, and while you could look at it as a blessing that Viloria has more time to prepare, he doesn’t necessarily agree.
“Hopefully it is a blessing,” he said, “but I was ready for this fight. I was about to peak, and I was on weight, and I was so looking forward to being in Vegas and winning this fight, and then this had to happen. Yeah, I got a month more, but it’s just making the weight a little bit more intense.”
Now, he’ll just have to pull back the reins a bit and get ready again for the grind leading up to the bout, where he’ll push himself to the non-scientific, but oh, so important point where he’s at peak performance strength just in time to face Ortiz. It’s something a pro fighter learns with time, and something he gets better with as he moves through the ranks. But the most important thing Viloria has learned in his days since he was a representative of the US Olympic team in 2000 was how to deal with life outside the ropes. And sometimes, that’s harder than taking punches inside of them.
“I learned a lot about having to fight outside of the ring, trying to get fights scheduled and trying to maintain those fights,” he said. “I think it’s a lot harder than training itself. I really didn’t expect it to be this hard, but unfortunately it is, especially for my weight division, and a lot of waiting is involved. Trying to be patient and finding the right opportunity to be in the ring again, I think that’s the hardest part and the biggest thing I’ve learned about the pro game.”
He’s also learned a hard lesson (along with Olympic teammate Jose Navarro) about the American fight fans’ biases against fighters south of 140 pounds (or in rare cases 135 pounds).
“It’s frustrating, but I try to take a look at it as it will take us to ignite something in our weight divisions for people to pay more attention,” said Viloria. “The way I look at it is that it’s just a matter of time for me – when I win a world title – that more people will look into our weight division, with the help of Jorge Arce and Vic Darchinyan as world champions (at flyweight) also. We should give great fights for the fans, and I think that’s all we need. It doesn’t take one person to make a weight division. We need each other to make our division popular enough for people to come down and watch us fight.”
Viloria, who has spent his entire career at flyweight – where he has earned the NABF and WBC Youth titles – will drop four pounds to 108 to face Ortiz, but with marquee matchups (at least for fight aficionados) at 112 pounds with Arce and Darchinyan, expect a jump back up to his more natural weight sometime soon after winning the belt. And if you’ve followed the sport closely for any amount of time, you just know that a bout between Viloria and the hellaciously entertaining Arce (who defends the interim WBC belt at 112 pounds tonight against Viloria KO victim Angel Priolo) would just have to be a war.
“That’s a key person for us to bring a lot more attention to our division,” said Viloria of the 26-year-old Mexican warrior. “We need even more guys like that in our weight division because statistically speaking there are not enough knockouts, or there’s not enough ‘lure’ for people to pay attention to us or for the fans to come out and watch. But now I look at it like ‘wow’, with Jorge Arce coming up the way he is, and Darchinyan coming up and winning a world title the way he did, there’s going to come a time where everyone’s going to start fighting each other and it’s going to be great fights and great draws, and that’s what I’m looking forward to.”
After a hard road to the championship level fights, and a 2005 that has been tough to deal with so far, to say the least, Viloria finally sounds excited again about the sport and where he’s going if he can get the right breaks in the coming months. Watching a couple of his Olympic teammates – most recently middleweight champ Jermain Taylor – reach the pinnacle of the sport doesn’t hurt either.
“That gave me a lot of boost,” said Viloria of Taylor’s recent win over Bernard Hopkins, “we’re actually doing it, and that everyone coming off the Olympic team is winning world titles got me a little bit more hyped up than usual and the whole time I was watching the fight I was like, ‘man, that’s gonna be me.’ I want to get in there and win some hardware, and that’s why we’ve been training – we’ve been bred to be world champions. Seeing Jermain go through that, and Jeff Lacy winning a world title is just inspiring me a little bit more and making me train harder.”
Viloria jokes about hugging the title belt and sleeping with it for a week after he wins it, but most importantly, he knows that once he can put the words “world champion” after his name, then the real work begins, to move from being just another title holder to being the leader of a new wave of exciting lower weight class fighters.
He’s ready to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.
“I’m ready for everything right now and I’ll do whatever it takes to make people realize that we’re out here fighting our hearts out and we are giving great fights, a lot more than some of these middleweights and some of these heavyweights,” said Viloria. “It’s all heart and all guts type of boxing. The way Arce did it gave us a little insight into how it’s gonna be if you just fight really hard and give the people what they want to come in and see.”
“We do deserve a look.”
