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.

Like many Polynesian boys, Hola excelled on the football field and won an athletic scholarship to the U. But "we never heard him talk about playing (football) professionally," Mila said. "He always said he would use his scholarship to get through school" and then go into business.

He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in business and management and served an LDS Church mission in Roanoke, Va.

But there was always more to the Hola plan. "I had this need to make a difference," he said of his hankering for political office. "But I didn't have the old-family money to (fund) running for office."

He has built up his business to provide the infrastructure for his mayoral bid, and in recent months his team of managers has been running Icon while he's campaigned full time.

Last spring nobody outside Hola's inner circle saw him as a man with any chance of becoming mayor of Utah's capital, let alone survive the primary. But an August Deseret News/KSL-TV poll showed he has gathered support from 17 percent of Salt Lake voters and is the second choice of 46 percent of opponent Frank Pignanelli's supporters.

But isn't this, his first mayoral run, mostly about building name recognition for next time?

"We are going to win this race," is his only response.