Compton, Every share Greenbrier lead

Golf Betting Lines

07/29/2010 - White Sulphur Springs, WV (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Erik Compton, the two-time heart transplant recipient, fired a seven-under 63 Thursday to share the first-round lead with Matt Every at The Greenbrier Classic.

Playing on another sponsor's exemption and still battling stamina issues, Compton birdied nine of his last 15 holes for a career-best score on the PGA Tour.

Finishing his round after an 80-minute weather delay, Every matched his career low to tie Compton. He missed a 10-foot birdie putt on his last hole with a chance to take the lead by himself.

Jeff Overton, George McNeill and Pat Perez shared third place at six-under 64, while Brendon de Jonge, Charles Howell III, Aron Price, Matt Bettencourt and John Rollins all shot 65.

Compton's previous best score was a 67 in the first round of the Mayakoba Golf Classic in February.

"I'm not thinking about winning," he said. "I'm just thinking about one shot at a time and getting through the weekend."

Compton, of course, has had bigger things on his mind.

He was diagnosed as a child with cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle, and received his first heart transplant when he was 12 years old. The second came in 2008.

Now 30, Compton is not just chasing his first win, he's grinding his way towards earning full-time playing privileges on the PGA or Nationwide Tour after losing so much time -- about four years in his late-20s -- to illness.

"In some aspect, I look at myself as an old guy," said Compton. "I also look at myself as a young guy in a career playing golf."

Compton has tried to make the best of his playing opportunities this season, which include six previous starts on the PGA Tour. He has also played two European Tour events in the Middle East and made one start on the Nationwide Tour.

He is playing this week for the third time since the U.S. Open, where his condition was thrust into the spotlight on one of golf's biggest stages. He shot 77-81 at Pebble Beach, the first of three straight missed cuts.

Compton likes to say that he knows he's supposed to shoot bad scores, but that isn't the way he feels things have been going for him recently.

"I was getting some bad breaks, and it was hard to take advantage of plugged lies and things like that," he said.

"Some guys miss six, seven cuts in a row and then win. I know I'm a good player, and I have a lot of the adversity in front of me with the game and health. But I always feel like if I stick in there and keep trying, something eventually good is gonna happen."

He found trouble early on The Old White Course with back-to-back bogeys at the second and third holes. But Compton made nine birdies and six pars the rest of the way.

"I hit some really close shots, a couple good putts, and I guess the round just kind of developed like that," he said.

Among his birdies was a 30-foot putt at No. 5 and "it was pretty much a blur after that," Compton said. "I was taking one shot at a time."

Compton knocked his second shot at the 572-yard 17th about 18 yards short of the green, pitched to three feet and rolled in the birdie putt to move atop the leaderboard by himself.

The round was delayed for 80 minutes because of threatening weather conditions, and when the second half of the draw returned to the course, Every made his move.

He finished off a birdie at the 17th -- his eighth hole -- with a four-foot putt to move within two shots of Compton's lead.

Every followed with a 14-footer at the 18th for his third straight birdie, polishing off a 30 on the back nine that also included a 15-foot eagle putt at the par-five 12th.

He followed that with five straight pars, then rolled in a 14-foot birdie putt at the sixth hole to tie Compton at seven-under.

"I drove it great and then made some putts," said Every. "My irons were pretty standard, but I ... was in play every hole. So it was nice."

Every earned his PGA Tour card by winning the season-ending Nationwide Tour Championship last October. He denied possessing marijuana after being arrested, along with two other people, at a hotel two days before the start of John Deere Classic earlier this month.

NOTES: This is the first year of this event...Compton and Every both earned their first 18-hole leads on the PGA Tour...Every also shot a 63 in the first round of the Phoenix Open in February...Justin Leonard (67), Jim Furyk (68), Sergio Garcia (68), John Daly (69) and David Toms (70) are some of the bigger names in the field.

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SPORTS BETTING - Tennis is an underrated and under-utilized bettors' sport.

Ten years ago, at just about this time, I called Alan Boston in Vegas and left him a voicemail that went something like this (abridged version): "Hey Alan, Chad Millman from ESPN The Magazine calling. I want to do a book about wise guys, you in?"

A couple weeks later I got a message back (abridged version): "I don't know, maybe," Boston said. "Call me and we'll talk about it. But not later today. I got $1,000 on Andre Agassi to win the French Open at 40-1, and he's in the finals."

Here's what happened next (abridged version): Agassi won his tourney. Boston won his $40,000. I wrote sportsbook.

In the ten years since, how much has been wagered on the big-time tennis events? Put it this way: The Nevada Gaming Commission doesn't even track the number year by year because it's so small.

"Tennis makes up about one-tenth of one percent of our take," says Lucky's bookmaking boss Jimmy Vaccaro. "The last big golf major we probably had $100,000 worth of bets. In tennis, we might have written two big tickets."

Tennis' lack of popularity amongst the American bettoratti is no surprise, really. For starters, the biggest sports betting holidays -- the Super Bowl, the NCAA tourney -- are must see TV. People, at least the degenerates I know, plan vacations around watching those events in Vegas sports books.

But Wimbledon? Doesn't exactly reel in the whales. "Seriously, it's the nuts as an event," says Boston. "But who even knows when it's on?"

Here's another reason that helps explain why golf gets traction, something I call "The Bubbe Theory." My Bubbe is pushing 95 and has cataracts so bad that, to her, even the most crystalline Chicago day is mostly cloudy. But she still listens to the Cubs games, and she still calls me in a fit if she disagrees with something Rick Telander writes in the Chicago Sun Times. She's a sports fan. If she doesn't know you, you're just filling a niche. And niche players, even historically good ones like Roger and Raf, don't drive betting volume. Only the highest profile names attract square money, which inflates wagering totals like a shot of saline to the lips. Bubbe, and the public, loved Agassi, tennis' last cross-the-rubicon, mainstream draw. She also has a crush on Tiger. She's given me standing orders to put a sawbuck on the big cat whenever I walk through a sports book (or mistakenly tap into one via my Internet machine.) That explains why the Masters is getting $100K in action at some books while the four tennis majors might not get that combined this year.

This isn't a case of tennis being a difficult sport to bet. In fact, in Europe, it's probably the second most popular sport for gambling after soccer. Granted, as the WSJ football betting last week and The Mag's Shaun Assael examined in even greater depth last year, that might be because gamblers across the pond see it as an easy game to fix. But it could also be because, over there it holds the kind of sway the big two do over here.

Street corners in Spain are peppered with public courts and kids doing their best Raffy impressions. In some war torn parts of Eastern Europe poverty-stricken kids view tennis as an escape route, like football or basketball here. A couple years ago The Mag's Lindsay Berra wrote a great piece about Belgrade's Jelena Jankovic, Ana Ivanovic and Novak Djokovic. They learned the game as kids while bombs were raining down on their homeland. They practiced in drained swimming pools. Not exactly Nick Bolletierri conditions.

In the United States, casual fans think tennis is played four times a year. But on the tightly packed European continent, national interest in homegrown talent runs deep every weekend. Of the ATP's current top 20 players, only two, tennis betting and James Blake, are American. Fourteen are from Europe, representing six different countries.

No wonder fans from Lisbon to Bhudapest get jacked up for the net game, whether it's Wimbledon or a low-level tourney like the Estoril Open in Portugal (congrats to Spain's Albert Montanes for winning that one, btw). Chances are good that someone representing their flag will not only be playing, but have a shot at winning.

And that's all any bettor can ask for.

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