OXNARD, Calif. — On its surface, Netflix’s eight-part Dallas Cowboys documentary, while fascinating, contains no major revelations.
It does, though, drop a big hint.
That hint prompted a Tuesday question from The Dallas Morning News and a candid, newsworthy response from Cowboys owner Jerry Jones: He fought stage 4 melanoma for a decade and an experimental trial drug saved 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 now have no tumors.”
Jones, 82, said his cancer diagnosis occurred in June 2010 and, soon after, he began treatment at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Jones said that during the ensuing decade he had four surgeries: two lung surgeries and two lymph node surgeries. He began the experimental PD-1 immunotherapy trial toward the latter part of the decade, but Jones and a Cowboys spokesperson did not specify the year.
According to the Melanoma Research Alliance, a stage 4 diagnosis means that the skin cancer cells have metastasized to other parts of the body.
The American Cancer Society states that patients with stage 4 melanoma have a five-year survival rate of 35%, but a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center study suggests that new treatments have increased the five-year survival rate to 50%.
The full name of PD-1 is Programmed Cell Death Protein 1. PD-1 immunotherapy helps the immune system fight cancer cells by blocking PD-1, thus enabling T cells to better recognize and destroy cancer cells.
Jones’ brief description about his cancer battle came during a wider-ranging Tuesday interview with The News.
Early in the fifth episode of Netflix’s America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, Jones makes reference to undergoing cancer treatments at MD Anderson “about a dozen years ago.”
Netflix conducted more than 40 hours of interviews with Jones during a two-year period. It’s not clear when the interview occurred in which Jones mentioned cancer, without specifying what kind or in what way MD Anderson was treating him.
The Netflix documentary’s Episode 5 — “The Shootout at Valley Ranch” — details the unraveling of the relationship between Jones and coach Jimmy Johnson. Jones fired Tom Landry and hired former Arkansas teammate Johnson upon purchasing the Cowboys on Feb. 25, 1989.
Early in Episode 5, Jones said that an MD Anderson physician told him:
“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.
“At No. 1, I wrote down the name ‘Jimmy Johnson.’ ”
With a wry smile during the documentary interview, Jones delivered the punchline: “I went back to the doctor a few weeks later and said, ‘I can’t get past that first [expletive].”
Find more Cowboys coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
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