SPRINGVILLE — The kid from Payson expected to be the next great Brigham Young University quarterback.
But Matt Throckmorton has a far better chance as an underdog to beat four-term Congressman Chris Cannon in next week's Republican primary than he had of playing ahead of Ty Detmer.
"I was delusional," Throckmorton says. "I thought I could walk on as a quarterback. I thought I'd be on the scout team like Steve Young. That dream lasted about 2 1/2 hours till the first workout was over."
That experience barely scarred Throckmorton when compared to another event that happened during his stay on campus — he tore his ACL playing basketball, ruining his chance to meet a deadline for Navy Officer Candidate School training.
"As a kid, I wanted to be a pilot so bad," he says. "When they told me I was done because of my ACL, that ticked me off pretty bad. I begged and whined. I called everyone. I called Sen. Hatch's office and they made a call for me."
That loss shaped Throckmorton as much as his turbulent high school years, when he bounced between homes in Utah, Nevada and California.
He can laugh about those days now, about moving back to Payson with spiked hair, a heavy surfer dialect and a yellow VW bug. It was right after the movie "Footloose" came out, and the Payson High kids nicknamed him "Kevin Bacon."
"It wasn't a compliment," he says.
Learning to laugh about the pilot thing is a more formidable task. "I've got to get over it someday soon," he says. But it's only been a dozen years, not nearly long enough.
The derailing led him to leave school and concentrate on his flooring business — and cleared the way for a career in politics. (He has continued working off and on for a political science degree and is just a few credits away now.)
At 29, he was recruited to run for the Utah Senate as an Independent American candidate against an entrenched Democrat. (Independent Americans "are ticked-off Republicans," Throckmorton says with a smile.) He had no money, but the Republican candidate convinced him to stay in the race. The ploy worked; the Republican won.
Two years later, in 1998, Throckmorton was back to run as a long shot as a Republican for the Utah House.
"Everybody just expected I'd get whipped," he says. "I expected I'd just get whipped."
Instead, with the incumbent paying too little attention to the upstart challenger, Throckmorton ran off with 85 percent of the vote at the convention. He'd proved he was tough by playing rugby at BYU, but the baby-faced new legislator looked too young to shave at age 31.
Every single Capitol guard stopped him the first time he or she encountered Throckmorton, ordering him to go back and get his intern badge.
Regardless, he quickly became an unusually productive legislator but gave it up after two terms when redistricting put him in the same district as another popular Republican representative. Instead of slugging it out there, he took on incumbent Republican Rep. Chris Cannon for the 3rd Congressional District seat nomination in 2002 but was eliminated from the race at the state convention.
This year, he had a tough set of choices to make.
Republican Party sources say Throckmorton was approached to run in this election cycle for his old Utah House seat — which probably would have been an easy win now that incumbent Rep. Calvin Bird is resigning at the end of the month in the wake of his citation for soliciting a prostitute — and for the Utah Senate seat surrendered by Bill Wright, who, like Throckmorton, was a member of the Legislature's "Cowboy Caucus."
He also considered running for the Utah County Commission when incumbent Gary Herbert announced he was bowing out to run for governor.
But Throckmorton wasn't done with Cannon, which is a direct result of lessons he learned during his teenage turmoil.
Throckmorton's parents are a Romeo and Juliet story. Dee Throckmorton and Gail Chapman came from politically opposite households — Dee, Republican and Gail, Democrat. They met making machine-gun bullets for World War II in the Remington factory on Redwood Road. They had eight children, but when their youngest, Matt, was 9, the stubborn pair divorced.
A few years ago they remarried. But for Matt, high school was a struggle.
"You learn to figure things out," he says of living without an anchor. "It takes the shiny veneer off a lot of things. I'm not afraid to be told no, and to lose."
He also learned to see the good in people, so criticism of another is always prefaced by the phrase, "so-and-so is a good guy, but . . ."
"Chris is a really nice guy," Throckmorton says of Cannon. "My frustration with Chris is that he runs with the Washington crowd."
So as he decided which race to run, Throckmorton chose to take a second shot at Cannon, to challenge him on immigration reform and the federal "No Child Left Behind" education program.
"If we re-elect Chris, we're guaranteeing 'No Child Left Behind' and other things," Throckmorton says. "I'd rather lose and stand up for what I believe in than win another race and have something like this."
Cannon can seem intimidatingly smart, but Throckmorton appears as a seasoned, lettered policy pro during debates. The two agree on most everything, but Throckmorton is obviously at ease standing toe-to-toe with the incumbent and trading roundhouse punches about the minutiae of health-care savings accounts.
A poll last month showed Cannon with a commanding lead, but Throckmorton promises a close race, despite being outspent 10-1 as of the last financial filing deadline. (Sources expect that to tighten up to 4-1 or 5-1 by Tuesday's primary.)
And if he loses, what's next?
"Politics is a hard master," he says. "George Patton said, 'America loves a winner.' If we lose, I won't run for office again for awhile. My wife and I decided before this race that we'd take a long break if that happened."
That doesn't mean Valerie will step back from a political fight, either.
"She was raised politically active," Throckmorton said. "She was campaigning from the time she was 3 years old. She doesn't know any better."
The couple's daughter was 3 herself when Throckmorton took her on a honk-and-wave event. A teenager in the passenger seat of a passing car had only a few moments before his ride reached the corner and the group of Throckmorton supporters, but he still managed to get up, whirl around and bare his bottom.
"It was a really athletic move," Throckmorton says with a laugh. "My daughter still talks about the guy who showed his bummy."
Even if mom and dad didn't have politics in their blood, how could the Throckmorton family give that up?
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com