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.