Erik Compton’s remarkable story has Hollywood written all over it and, indeed, there have already been approaches about book deals.

It is an inspiring, emotion-tugging 20-year tale of the first person to receive not only a heart transplant, but two of them, and persevere to earn a PGA Tour card.

The hangup is that Compton isn’t done adding to his saga just yet.

As triumphant as his debut as a card-carrying member of the PGA Tour is today with a 1 p.m. tee time in the Sony Open in Hawaii, he views it as merely the next chapter in a still-unfolding story, not the curtain-lowering conclusion.

“It is a tough story to write because it is still in the process,” Compton said Wednesday.

As much a long shot as it might be for the 32-year-old Compton to win a tournament championship, who is to say he can’t? Certainly not the kids who made fun of him when he needed help to ascend the tee boxes as a teenage heart transplant recipient. And not the doctors who questioned the wisdom of so thoroughly immersing himself in the stress and travel of the game’s highest levels.

Compton has battled viral cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle in which it becomes inflamed and restricts the ability to pump blood, for most of his life. He endures a regimen of up to 15 pills twice a day to fight rejection of his second heart. He lives with 20-pound swings in his weight, palpitations and constant testing.

But even when he knows his physical prime on a good day is, maybe, 70 percent of those he is competing against, he charges on undaunted.

“I think competition is what keeps me from sitting on the couch and listening to my heart,” Compton said. “The more success you have, you want to push yourself to become better.”

His parents ingrained in him the belief that self-pity would get him nowhere. And while doctors removed his original heart at age 12, the drive to compete remained in his marrow. When he emerged from the hospital two weeks after that first heart transplant, he proclaimed a goal of some day becoming a pro athlete.

At the time he hoped it would be in baseball, his first love. Others thought differently. He recalls a youth league umpire asking him if he needed a bus to get to second base. “I still had the hand-eye coordination, I think that’s why I really fell into golf,” Compton said. “I didn’t have to be as strong as everyone else.”

Also he could play with his father, far from the shunning eyes of other kids. “When I had my first transplant in ’92, I was basically a guinea pig for the medications they would give me,” Compton said. “They gave me medications then they wouldn’t give me now. The side effects were so unbearable I looked, literally, like an egg with two sticks.”

But playing with his dad on a golf course kept him away from the colds of other kids. And, “… I was away from people (and) they wouldn’t make fun of me,” Compton recalled.

He resolved to make the most of the lease on life and became the 1998 Rolex Junior Golfer of the year on the way to two seasons as an All-American at Georgia.

But just as a budding pro career was beginning to show promise in 2007, he suffered a heart attack. In 2008 came a 12-hour surgery for a second transplant.

And, of course, a return to the links.

Last year Compton won the hurricane-delayed Mexico Open, playing 27 holes on the final day, and finished in 13th place on the Nationwide Tour money list. That earned him his PGA Tour card.

At the time it was heralded as a “miracle.”

“There were people who contacted me to do book deals when I was younger, people wanted to do a lifetime story,” Compton said. “But I want to be out here to win at this level and I don’t think my story is quite done yet.”

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.