Golf: Despite challenging summer, Bittick pushes on

Gary Bittick hasn’t been playing a lot of golf this summer.

Not until recently. For most of the summer, Bittick has spent most of his time and travel in support of his daughter, Cali, a 24-year-old premedical student heading into her first year at UT-Dallas.

Less than two months ago, Cali Bittick had brain surgery to remove a benign tumor that threatened her spinal cord.

“We were in Dallas, literally day and night, for two weeks,” Gary Bittick said.

When the summer months began in Odessa, Cali Bittick started struggling to keep her balance.

At first, she didn’t think much of the problems. Then she fell into a wall.

Under normal circumstances, Cali lives alone, and there might not have been anybody there to tell Cali to go to the emergency room.

But her cousin picked that day to visit.

“We took her to the hospital here, they did an MRI and flew her to Dallas that night by jet,” Gary Bittick said.

Bittick lives in a family full of medical professionals.

His wife, Jody, works for local physician Weldon Butler. Cali is studying to work in nueroradiology. By the time neurosurgeon Samuel Barnett at UT-Dallas’s Zale-Lipshy Hospital — the same hospital that Cali will be working in during her time at medical school — told Cali that she was going to need brain surgery, the entire family knew the risks.

None of those risks came into play.

“It’s a very rare form of tumor,” Gary Bittick said. “But it came out great. The results couldn’t have been any better.”

Cali’s father is an avid golfer, a regular at local partnership-style tournaments during the summer. Up until this weekend, though, he hadn’t played much.

He had more important things to worry about.

But Bittick has been playing well this weekend. Playing in the first flight of the senior division at the Odessa City Championships, he’s sitting in first place after shooting even-par through the first two rounds.

Bittick leads Jerry Thomas by a stroke, but he isn’t feeling the pressure that some golfers might feel heading into the final day.

“Your priorities are different,” Bittick said. “It shows you that golf is just a game.”

And it can be awfully fun when a golfer is playing well.