It was after midnight when the phone rang. Pete Compton felt his
pulse racing as he heard the news his family had wished for and
dreaded. A boy had died in a traffic accident; now there was a
donor heart for 12-year-old Erik Compton, who needed a
transplant. Pete went to his son's dark bedroom, touched him and
said, "Erik, wake up. Now's the time."
"I know. I heard the phone," Erik said.
Today, six years later, you wouldn't know he had undergone a
heart transplant unless he showed you the scar that bisects his
chest. The 18-year-old senior at Miami's Palmetto High seems
like any other young golfer, only better—he's No. 1 in the
latest national rankings. "Without my heart problem I probably
wouldn't have discovered golf," Compton says, "so I don't regret
anything."
He was a born jock. At nine he was a Little League shortstop,
the fastest kid in school, until what appeared to be a long
winter cold turned out to be something worse. He had congestive
cardiomyopathy, a disease that made his heart expand and beat
irregularly. "By the time Erik was 11, he was in serious
trouble. He was vomiting frequently, seeing spots. Sudden death
was a real risk," says Lee Ann Pearse, who supervised the
pediatric heart-transplant program that sought to match Erik to
a donor. Yet the boy wouldn't accept his fate. "Young people
don't feel mortal," Pete Compton says. "We had trouble getting
it through his head how sick he was." Erik would sneak out to
play baseball or suddenly take off sprinting down the street,
leaving his worried family behind. Still worse was a seemingly
endless year of waiting for a donor heart. As Pearse says, "It's
awfully stressful to watch your child dying in front of you."
The call finally came at 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 26, 1992, and with
help from a police escort the Comptons gathered at Miami's
Jackson Memorial Hospital, where Erik was taken to one of a pair
of side-by-side operating theaters. First the donor's heart was
removed and placed in a freezing solution for storage. Surgeon
Richard Perryman took out Compton's diseased heart and
transplanted its ice-cold replacement. "Then we waited and
watched while the heart warmed up. When it started beating, I
think my heart skipped a beat," Pearse says.
Compton woke to a new set of challenges. The operation left him
too weak to play baseball. The drugs that suppressed his body's
urge to reject the heart made his weight shoot from 90 pounds to
130. He was ashamed to go to his sixth grade graduation looking
so fat, but responded with characteristic spirit. He gritted his
teeth and showed up.
"I was always an in-your-face kind of kid," he says. Without
baseball he needed an outlet for his competitive drive and found
it at Costa del Sol, the golf course beside the Comptons' condo.
Within six weeks of the transplant he was hitting balls,
enjoying the solitude of the driving range. In his weakened
condition he could hit a five-iron only 80 yards, but he
practiced until he could rifle a ball 190 yards with the same
club. In less than a year Compton was breaking 90. A few months
later he shot 77 and began entering local tournaments. Today his
high school coach calls him the best ball striker Miami has
produced in decades. He had top 10 finishes in six of nine
junior tournaments last year and took another giant step in the
1997-98 season when two third-place finishes, a second and a win
at the Rolex Junior Classic shot him to the top of the rankings.
"Something clicked for me this year. I stopped trying too hard,"
says Compton, whose steady nerves and surgically precise 260- to
280-yard drives are becoming the envy of the junior circuit.
He still isn't out of the woods physically. He takes 14 pills a
day to fight tissue rejection and endures an annual biopsy in
which a catheter is injected and a bit of heart tissue is
snipped off, a painful procedure he calls "emotionally tough."
Peer pressure, too, can be tough on a competitor like Compton,
who says he could do without "punks hassling me about being
'just' a golfer, just because football and baseball are the big
high school sports."
This week he's among the favorites at the Taylor Made PineIsle
(Ga.) Junior Classic, which starts on Friday. Compton was to
announce on Wednesday that he'll attend Georgia, a choice based
partly on the Athens campus's proximity to Emory University
Medical Center. "More important, though, it's where I want to
play," he says. "I used to like baseball more, but I'm all about
golf now. It's sort of a selfish game. In golf it's all on you,
win or lose. I like that." As for living with a heart he wasn't
born with, he adds, "Sure, I have my worries, but who doesn't?"
Worries? On his last trip to Disney World he rode Space Mountain
eight times in a row.
Issue date: April 13, 1998
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