Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones revealed to reporters on Tuesday that he had secretly battled a devastating illness for about a decade.
The revelation came after some detective work by a reporter from the Dallas Morning News, who noticed something odd in a recent Cowboys-focused documentary.
The Netflix doc “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys” contains over 40 hours of interviews with the franchise owner, and in episode five, Jones reportedly dropped a hint that he had been seeing doctors at a special clinic.
‘I was saved by a fabulous treatment.’
According to Brad Townsend’s report, the episode “The Shootout at Valley Ranch” showed Jones explaining that a doctor at MD Anderson had given him advice on how to deal with the tense relationship he had with former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson.
“You need to do a lot of meditation. Make a list of 10 people who can just boil your blood. Start with the one at the top and wish for them the greatest things you can wish for,” Jones reportedly recalled about the doctor’s advice. “At No. 1, I wrote down the name ‘Jimmy Johnson.'”
In his story, Jones said he returned to see the same doctor a few weeks later. What might not be obvious to most viewers is that MD Anderson is a cancer hospital in Houston, Texas.
The discovery led to the local Dallas reporter asking Jones about a possible diagnosis, causing Jones to drop the bombshell that he been hiding a battle with stage 4 melanoma for almost 15 years.
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– YouTube
“I was saved by a fabulous treatment and great doctors and a real miracle [drug] called PD-1,” Jones told the Dallas Morning News. “I went into trials for that PD-1, and it has been one of the great medicines.”
The American Cancer Society lists melanoma as having a five-year survival rate, or about a third of the amount of time since Jones received his diagnosis in June 2010.
“I now have no tumors,” the 82-year-old revealed.
PD-1 stands Programmed Cell Death Protein 1, an immunotherapy that fights cancer cells and enables T-cells to better recognize and destroy cancer cells.
Jones also noted his treatments over the years included four surgeries: two lung surgeries and two lymph node surgeries. The franchise owner only started the experimental procedures toward the end of the 2010s, but it remains unclear which year that was.
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Despite the success the recent documentary is based on, the Cowboys have struggled throughout the last 25 years and have not come anywhere close to a Super Bowl berth.
The Cowboys are coming off a 31-21 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the preseason last Saturday and have endured recent public turmoil stemming from contract disputes with defensive star Micah Parsons.
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