Cowboys’ Jerry Jones Reveals Cancer Battle

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is going public about an experimental drug he credits with saving his life amid his ongoing cancer battle.

In the fifth episode of the Netflix documentary “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys,” Jones, 82, revealed he was recently diagnosed with cancer and sought treatment at MD Anderson in Houston, but he didn’t specify much about what drug extended his life.

“I was saved by a fabulous treatment and great doctors and a real miracle [drug] called PD-1 [therapy],” he said on “Dallas Morning News” this week.

“I went into trials for that PD-1, and it has been one of the great medicines. I now have no tumors.”

Jones’s diagnosis is just the latest in a long battle with cancer stretching back to June 2010. Since then, the Cowboys owner estimates he’s undergone two lung surgeries and two lymph node surgeries. He had previously battled stage 4 melanoma, a state when skin cancer has spread to other parts of the body.

PD or “program death” medicines are a new class of immunotherapies which use a patient’s immune system to “recognize and attack cancer cells,” according to the American Cancer Association.

For decades, skin cancer which spread to stage 4 was largely impossible to cure. Instead, doctors focused on slowing the spread and treating the symptoms.

Today, however, new medical advancements — including immunotherapies and targeted checkpoint inhibitors that help the body’s T-cells fight off the cancer — have given patients like Jones hope that they will live many long, healthy years after their treatment.

Brian Schottenheimer, the team’s coach, spoke in the Netflix doc about his own battle with thyroid cancer at just 28 years old.

“It just [teaches] you a lot about your health, how important it is and it doesn’t discriminate against anybody,” he said.

“Mine was certainly less serious. … Nothing like stage 4, nothing like what Jerry and other people have to go through,” Schottenheimer said. “But you hear that word ‘cancer,’ and it scares the hell out of you.”

The Netflix project explores Jones’s purchase of the team, his firing of Tom Landry, and the Cowboys dynasty of the 1990s. In between team highlights, Jones interweaves his own life story.

“I’m glad that Jerry shared it because I think it gives people hope,” Schottenheimer explained, per ESPN. “It gives people the strength to say, ‘OK, you can beat this. You can do that.’ And when you have that type of diagnosis to have that hope and that ability to think, ‘I can fight through this and maybe I can catch a break and get lucky,’ that’s great.”