After a dozen years in the NFL and three Super Bowl titles, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and current FOX announcer, Troy Aikman, retired after the 2000 season for health reasons.
Despite some reports at the time that he left his game days behind due to the number of bruises he suffered during his career, which fortunately did not cause a serious problem for the Hall of Fame, Aikman actually retired due to persistent problems on the back.
Two years before retiring, however, Troy Aikman went through another health scare that few people knew about, one that he really didn’t feel comfortable talking about for a long time.
Troy Aikman played 12 years for the Dallas Cowboys
For those who may not be old enough to remember Troy Aikman’s game days with the Dallas Cowboys, do yourself a favor and come back and watch some videos.
Climbed first overall in the 1989 NFL draft, Aikman and the Cowboys fought to a 1-15 record in his debut year, which was also Jerry Jones’ first year as an owner and Jimmy Johnson’s first year as a trainer main, at least at the professional level.
But little by little, the franchise started adding pieces around Aikman and the Cowboys became the most dominant team in the NFL just a few years later. Dallas won three Super Bowl titles in four years, from the early to mid-1990s, and Aikman won the Super Bowl MVP in the Cowboys first game win over the Buffalo Bills.
Troy Aikman had 90 wins as a full-back in the 1990s, the third biggest of any quarterback in any decade, and once made six consecutive appearances in the Pro Bowl. The former UCLA star was injured by injuries in his last years in Dallas, but still holds several franchise records. He was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame in 2006 and is also a member of the famous Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor.
Troy Aikman was diagnosed with stage two melanoma in 1998
In 1998, Troy Aikman was just getting out of the shower and noticed a dark spot on the back of his shoulder that he had never seen before. He didn’t think about it too much at first, but during a family trip to Hawaii a few weeks later, he asked his sisters, both nurses, about it and they recommended that he have an exam as soon as possible.
Aikman went to the dermatologist shortly after and was informed that he had stage two melanoma. Fortunately, it was discovered before the cancer had a chance to spread and he could avoid radiation or chemotherapy, but his doctors told him how serious things could have gotten and that he needed to take better precautions while he was in the sun, same advice that Aikman has given people in recent years.
He was relatively quiet in his diagnosis for almost two decades
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After his diagnosis in 1998, Troy Aikman gave some interviews in Dallas about how he had the biopsy done, but somehow it never became a big story. In an interview with People in 2016, Aikman said that his “experience with melanoma was very personal” and that he was not very interested in sharing his story for a long time.
But over the years, he began to realize how many lives are affected and lost by melanoma each year. One such person was his good friend and longtime NFL assistant coach Jim Johnson (not the Dallas Cowboys’ head coach), who announced in January 2009 that he was undergoing treatment for melanoma. Unfortunately, his cancer progressed and he died just six months later.
In the years since his diagnosis, Aikman has had a checkup every six months or so and although he has some suspicious growths frozen, as he told Healthline, no other melanoma stain has been found. After years of keeping his diagnosis a relative secret, he joined Novartis, a global healthcare company, for the “Melanoma Just Got Personal” campaign at the time he shared his story with People and continued to share that story in the years since then in an effort to raise awareness about skin cancer.
Statistics courtesy of Professional Football Referral