Cowboys owner Jerry Jones reveals cancer diagnosis and credits experimental drug

OXNARD, Calif. (AP) — Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones credited an experimental trial drug for successfully treating advanced melanoma as he disclosed his cancer diagnosis publicly for the first time.

Jones revealed his illness in a documentary series, “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys,” which will debut on Netflix next week. The 82-year-old Jones then told The Dallas Morning News how he was initially diagnosed in June 2010 and underwent two surgeries on his lung and two on his lymph nodes over the next 10 years after skin cancer cells metastasized to other parts of his body.

“Well, you don’t like to think about your mortality, but I was so fortunate to have some great people that sent me in the right direction,” Jones said after practice on Wednesday. “I got to be part of a trial that was propitious. It really worked. It’s called PD-1 (therapy), and it really, really, really worked.”

First-year Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer described Jones’ fight with cancer as an “amazing story” and praised him for going public.

“I’m glad that Jerry shared it, just because I think it gives people hope,” Schottenheimer said Wednesday. “It gives people the strength to say … ‘Hey, you can beat this.’”

Schottenheimer, 51, used his last news conference of the Cowboys’ nearly monthlong stay in Southern California to talk about his own cancer diagnosis. He underwent surgery in 2003 for thyroid cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Then-Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder helped arrange Schottenheimer’s treatment two years after firing his father, Marty Schottenheimer, as coach. Brian Schottenheimer was Washington’s quarterbacks coach during the 2001 season, the same year Snyder himself was treated for thyroid cancer.

“It doesn’t discriminate against anybody,” Schottenheimer said. “And mine was certainly less serious, but I was 28 when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Nothing like Stage 4, nothing like what Jerry and other people have to go through. But you hear that word ‘cancer,’ and it scares the hell out of you.”