Posted on: Friday, June 3, 2005

Viloria has a lot to think about

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

The words come slowly and measured as an introspective Brian Viloria talks about his search for answers to the haunting questions that won't go away.

For six days now, ever since his opponent, Ruben Contreras of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, was taken from a Los Angeles ring on a stretcher to undergo emergency brain surgery, Viloria has shadow boxed with the whys of a night gone horribly wrong.

Why, for instance, doesn't California have mandatory CT scans or MRIs, like several of the other states Viloria has fought in?

If it did, would such an exam have shown something that could have prevented Contreras, whose condition is said to be stable, from now laying in the California Medical Center hooked up to a ventilator? Could anything have?

Unlike the opponents he fought on the way to a berth on the U.S. Olympic team and all 17 foes he's overcome as a pro, they are questions the soft-spoken Viloria has not been able to dispatch.

With eight weeks before his scheduled World Boxing Council light flyweight title bout in Las Vegas, Viloria's thoughts haven't strayed far from last Saturday night. "I'll get myself gathered together again before I start training," Viloria said.

In the meantime, "I think about it a whole lot. I try to come up with reasons why it happened. Those type of questions keep rising to my head. Ways of thinking about how some of these things could have been prevented."

Not until he emerged from the locker room shower at the Staples Center did Viloria say he'd come to grasp the tragedy surrounding his sixth-round triumph. "They were saying the ambulance was trying to get back (into the building) and I'm like, 'what ambulance?'

"They told me, 'the ambulance that took the guy you just fought to the hospital. He had a seizure. He had to have (emergency) surgery.' "

Since then neither the prayers for Contreras and his family nor questions about what might have prevented the incident have been far from the mind of Viloria, who checks his opponent's condition daily.

Said Viloria: "It makes you think about how everything is, about boxing and about life goes in general when the guy you just (faced) is fighting for his life rather than for just a win.

"I know it wasn't my fault," Viloria said. "Everybody has been telling me there's nothing I could have done to prevent it, that it was just something that happened. People tell me to keep my head up and not to be too hard on myself. (But) maybe something could have helped him not to be in that position."

For Viloria, the search for answers continues.

A hospital representative said contributions may be sent to Contreras c/o the California Medical Center, 1401 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90015.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.