Cowboys owner Jerry Jones revealed that he fought stage 4 melanoma for a decade, and head coach Brian Schottenheimer revealed he fought his own battle with thyroid cancer at age 28.
During his Wednesday press conference, Schottenheimer was overcome with emotion and thanked Jones for sharing his own personal battle as a ray of hope and to shed light on what others might be going through.
“I’m glad that Jerry shared it,” Schottenheimer said. “Just because I think it gives people hope. It gives people the strength to say ‘Hey, you can beat this, you can do that.’ When you have that type of diagnosis, to have that hope and that ability to think, ‘Hey, I can fight through this and maybe I can catch a break and get lucky,’ I think that’s great.”
Schottenheimer received a thyroid cancer diagnosis in 2002. He was in his first year on the coaching staff of the Chargers under his father, Marty, working as the team’s quarterbacks coach.
Ironically, it was the man who fired Marty Schottenheimer in Washington — then-franchise owner Daniel Snyder — who wound up pointing the family in the right direction for treatment.
“You hear that word ‘cancer’ and it scares the hell out of you,” said Schottenheimer, who is now cancer-free. “… It was a very traumatic thing for me.”
“I broke down, of course. I lost it,” Schottenheimer said of finding his father in a defensive player meeting to share the news.
“He said ‘Hey, we’ll figure this out and we’ll get you the best help we can get.’ And he picked up the phone and called Dan Snyder, a guy that two years before had fired him.”
“He told me when Dan picked up the phone and my dad said to him, ‘Dan, I have a problem; Brian has cancer.’ Dan said, ‘Marty, give me 5 minutes, and I’ll call you back,’ and I think it was within 24 to 36 hours that I was on the operating table (at the Mayo Clinic) in Rochester, Minnesota. Again, it just shows you when you’re dealing with things like that, everything competitively stops.”
Jones was contacted by the Dallas Morning News following a comment he made during the Netflix documentary, “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys.”
In the documentary, Jones referenced undergoing cancer treatments “about a dozen years ago,” per the Dallas Morning News.
Jones said he underwent treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2010.
Jones, now 82, said he had four surgeries over the ensuing decade — two involving his lungs, two involving his lymph nodes. He credits the experimental trial drug PD-1 (Programmed Cell Death Protein 1) for saving his life.
“I was saved by a fabulous treatment and great doctors and a real miracle (drug) called PD-1 (therapy),” Jones said. “I went into trials for that PD-1 and it has been one of the great medicines. I have no tumors.”
Stage 4 melanoma means “cancer has spread beyond the skin to other organs, such as the lungs or liver,” per the Mayo Clinic.
According to the Dallas Morning News, the drug helps the immune system “fight cancer cells by blocking PD-1, thus enabling T cells to better recognize and destroy cancer cells.”
–Field Level Media
