Molonai Hola's optimism bowled over his rival right away.

John Lund was running against Hola for student body president at the University of Utah. They decided to go to lunch. Lund had what he now calls the "Hola experience," and decided he'd be not Hola's opponent but his running mate.

"I walked away smitten with the guy. I went back and said, 'I love the way you think, and I want to run as your vice president,' " Lund remembered. That was 1987, and the pair went on to win. Around that time, Hola told Lund he'd be mayor of Salt Lake City someday.

Now that Hola, 38, is in the race against incumbent Mayor Rocky Anderson and fellow challenger Frank Pignanelli, he's finding the road to elected office a bit rougher, of course. But talk to him or Lund, and you won't find even a shred of doubt that Hola will make it past the Oct. 7 primary election. Both are also positive he'll go on to win the mayor's seat on Nov. 4.

"He'll be a breath of fresh air when he takes office," Lund promised. "On the worst, rainiest, bleakest, coldest day, in Nai's eyes, it's beautiful weather. For him, the glass has never been half full. It's overflowing. And we need more of that."

Most people here would think Hola started life with an empty glass.

"I was born in a hut," Hola will tell you right away. It was a coconut-leaf hut in Futu'mu, Tonga, where he lived with five siblings until 1970, when the family moved to Utah. Hola's great-grandfather had wanted to bring his family to America for educational opportunity. He never made it, and neither did his children. Hola's father, three generations later, fulfilled that wish.

But Hola remembers being terrified when, 6 years old and speaking almost no English, he set out for James E. Moss Elementary. When his mother put him on the school bus, "I was scared. And she must have been 10 times as scared."

Later that year, his teacher, Mrs. Armstrong, stuck a shiny green star onto Hola's forehead. He'd learned a lot of English in a short time, so she took him by the shoulders, turned him to face the class, and said, "He's a good boy."

And that experience, sweet and sentimental as it sounds, put Hola on the path to politics. School officials continued to bolster his confidence, saying they saw in him nascent leadership ability. At Granite Park Junior High, then-vice principal Bob Fitt urged Hola to run for student body president. He did, and later won the same posts at at Granite High School and the U.

Hola remembers being a boy, looking up at the U. campus across the city. "It seemed so far away. The University of Utah: How am I ever going to get up there?" he wondered. His older sister, Ela Mila, remembers the hard times. "There were times when we were kids when we had to have water on our cereal in the morning. We just didn't have money." "And since both of our parents had to work, we had to look out for ourselves." From the beginning, Mila added, their father insisted they speak English and make American friends. The Hola family went to their neighborhood LDS ward chapel, not to the Tongan ward across town. "Our dad didn't play Tongan music around the house when we were kids, either. He always said, 'We didn't come to America to live in Tonga. We came here to try to better ourselves, and so you could get an education.' " Now she and her brother joke about the prohibition on all things Tongan. "But I think it helped us a lot. Our friends were Americans. We didn't hang out with just Tongans." Hola was especially facile when it came to befriending his schoolmates, be they jocks or geeks. "He just flows with people," Mila said. Hola lives on the east side now, and owns a successful defense contracting firm, Icon Consulting Group. He and his wife of one year looked all over Salt Lake City for a house, he said, and settled on one on Yalecrest because they liked being close to the U. "I can walk over to the football games," he said.