By Matthew Davis
Longtime Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, now cancer free, recently went public on his battle with Stage 4 melanoma via an interview with The Dallas Morning News and an upcoming Netflix series about the Cowboys that will air on Aug. 19.
“I was saved by a fabulous treatment and great doctors and a real miracle drug called PD-1 therapy,” Jones told the paper. “I went into trials for that PD-1, and it has been one of the great medicines. I now have no tumors.”
Jones received the diagnosis in 2010 but didn’t make it public despite the fact that he owns one of the most high-profile and expensive teams in professional sports. His prognosis wasn’t promising either during that time period as stage-four melanoma has a 35–50 percent five-year survival rate according to the American Cancer Society.
“Well, you don’t want to think about your mortality, but I was so fortunate to have some great people that sent me in the right direction,” he said. “I got to be a part of a trial that was propitious.”
Jones received treatment at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, and he had four major surgeries—two each on his lungs and lymph nodes. The PD-1 immunotherapy trial ultimately made the difference.
“It ate my hips up. I had both hips replaced because it’s rough on the bones, but other than that, I’m so proud to get to be sitting here with you guys and getting to do what we do.”
PD-1, short for Programmed Cell Death Protein 1, functions as an immune checkpoint inhibitor that enables the body to identify and eliminate cancer cells. The immunotherapy also keeps the immune cells from attacking healthy cells.
PD-1 blocks the cancer from interfering and allows T cells to seek out and kill the cancer cells.
Jones first mentioned his treatment during the Netflix series in the fifth episode in which, he made light of a doctor offering him a stress management technique of recalling 10 people who “boil your blood” and wishing the best for them, which ironically led to memories of the most successful Cowboys head coach of Jones’ tenure.
“At No. 1, I wrote down the name ‘Jimmy Johnson,’” Jones said about the former Super Bowl-winning coach during the film via The Dallas Morning News. “I went back to the doctor a few weeks later and said, ‘I can’t get past that first [expletive].”
Jones and Johnson had a highly public conflict that led to coach’s firing despite two Super Bowl wins in the 1990s. The Cowboys won one more Super Bowl with Barry Switzer as the head coach in the 1995 season, but Jones’s team hasn’t tasted anything close to that level of success since.
Jones will look to make the most of this year’s team, led by new head coach Brian Schottenheimer, 51, who had his own battle with thyroid cancer as a 28-year-old. Schottenheimer was a quarterbacks coach for the then-San Diego Chargers at the time.
“I’m glad that Jerry shared it, just because I think it gives people hope,” Schottenheimer told reporters on Wednesday. “It gives people the strength to say, ‘OK, hey, you can beat this.’”
“Mine was certainly less serious… nothing like Stage 4,” Schottenheimer added. “But you hear that word ‘cancer,’ and it scares the [expletive] out of you.”
Schottenheimer had surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and had his thyroid and 17 lymph nodes removed. Since then, he has coached another two decades between the NFL and one season in college amid assistant roles before his first head coaching job with the Cowboys.
Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott’s foundation has a cancer-screening initiative, and that helped Cowboys senior vice president of communications Tad Carper, who discovered his illness via that screening initiative and had a neck tumor removed in 2024.
