SALT LAKE CITY — As a high school freshman in Arizona, Tanner Ainge wanted to play quarterback on the football team. That he'd never played the pivotal position before didn't deter him.
Sadly, his highlights were the tackles he made after throwing interceptions.
"Tanner, you need to be a safety, not a quarterback," his father, Danny Ainge, recalled telling him.
Now a candidate in Utah's 3rd Congressional District race, Tanner Ainge has again thrown himself into a rough-and-tumble game. He's young. He's untested. And he's battling two seasoned Republicans for the job.
But according to his dad, who knows something about hard-nosed play, Ainge is driven, competitive and fearless. He's the same fourth-grader who dropped to the floor during class to do 100 pushups — much to the dismay of his teacher — so he could make his goal of 1,000 a day.
Ainge, 33, says he has lived his whole life at an accelerated pace. He graduated from BYU with an international studies degree in three years. He finished law school at Northwestern in 18 months. He has worked at an investment firm, as general counsel for a health care company, and now has his own consulting business, Ainge Advisory.
He disagrees with those who say it's not his time yet. It's not about age, Ainge said, but experience.
"If you take the resumes of the three candidates, I'll stack mine up against theirs all day long," Ainge recently said during a combined meeting of the Deseret News and KSL editorial boards. "And I think that I have energy to go and fight for the things that matter to the 3rd District."
Provo Mayor John Curtis and former state lawmaker Chris Herrod are also vying for the GOP nomination. The winner will face Democrat Kathie Allen and several third-party candidates in November.
Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, resigned at the end of June, necessitating a special election in the district that covers Carbon, Emery, Grand, San Juan and Wasatch counties, and parts of Salt Lake and Utah counties.
Ainge said he never imagined Chaffetz would step down, but when he did, the conservative Republican felt it was "time to get off the sidelines." He said he wants to get Washington working again.
Ainge listed his top priorities as reducing government spending, national debt and business regulations. Career politicians, he said, don't want to talk about those issues.
"Half the battle is just being willing to stand up and raise a voice," Ainge said.
Danny Ainge said politics wasn't a big topic around the dinner table among his six children, except for maybe at election time. Tanner Ainge was "infatuated" with Mitt Romney and his career path, the elder Ainge said. Tanner Ainge worked on Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, and that's maybe where he got the itch to run himself, Danny Ainge said.
Tanner Ainge started his professional career working for Huntsman Gay Global Capital, a private equity firm founded by Jon Huntsman Sr. and Robert Gay in 2007 that also included former BYU and NFL quarterback Steve Young as a partner. The company raised $1.1 billion for a fund focused on mid-market buyouts in a variety of industries.
Joel Peterson, founder of the Salt Lake-based private equity firm Peterson Partners, said he was interested in backing Ainge to look for a company to buy, but Ainge went to work for Huntsman Gay instead and got "great investor training."
Investors, Peterson said, have to evaluate risks and probabilities of outcomes and see around corners. And as a lawyer working in mergers and acquisitions, Ainge had to deal with mountains of details and know "the elephants from the ants," he said.
"I like that he’s not part of the political training. So many get working their way up through the political bureaucracy where they have to unlearn so many things that don’t work in a world of innovation, fast-moving technology and accountability, budgeting and deliverables," Peterson said.
In 2016, Ainge started Prelude Partners in Irvine, California, which sought to acquire and help grow family-owned businesses with $10 million to $50 million in revenue. Ainge in a company news release said that he would "personally relocate and devote 100 percent of my time" to ensure a smooth succession.
Ainge, and his wife, Heidi, are the parents of five children, ages 10 to almost 2. Tghe couple has lived in Utah, New York, China, Illinois, Massachusetts and California in their 12 years of marriage before settling in Alpine last year.
If elected, Ainge said, he would not move his family to Washington, D.C., adding he even asked Chaffetz for the famous cot he slept on in his congressional office.
"We're never leaving Utah," Ainge said.
Tanner and Heidi Ainge, whose mothers are best friends, started dating in high school in Arizona and married two months after he returned from a two-year LDS Church mission to Ghana.
Heidi Ainge said her husband is the most driven person she knows and also has as good heart. He made a dozen trips back to Ghana to help people gain skills and start businesses in the first five years of their marriage, she said.
"He used all of our savings basically to do that," Heidi Ainge said.
When he gets an idea in his head, he follows it through, she said. Like when he wanted to learn Mandarin Chinese after finishing at BYU because the Ghanaian dialect he learned as missionary wouldn't be all that useful.
The couple enrolled in an immersion program at Cornell University, spending six months there and six months in China. Their oldest son was born in Beijing, and the family attended a Chinese-speaking ward in California. Their children now attend Chinese immersion schools.
"He just gets these ideas and carries them out," Heidi Ainge said.
Danny Ainge, a former NBA star and general manager of the Boston Celtics, said his son talked him before jumping into the race. He said his first reaction was, "Why does anybody want to do this?" But he said he couldn't think of anybody who would be better at it.
Ainge's father said he runs into many hardworking, motivated competitors in his line of work.
"I don't (meet) many more than I would bet on than Tanner. He's just a bulldog and a workhorse, and he's also calm in the heat of fire," Danny Ainge said, adding his son reminds hims of Celtics coach Brad Stevens, who "has an incredible intensity that not very many people see because he so calm poised under pressure."