After a dozen years in the NFL and three Super Bowl titles, former Dallas Cowboys full-back and current FOX announcer Troy Aikman has retired due to health reasons after the 2000 season.
Despite some reports that he left his playing days behind due to the number of concussions he suffered during his career, which fortunately did not cause a serious problem for the Hall of Famer, Aikman retired due to persistent back problems.
Two years before he retired, however, Troy Aikman once again underwent a health scare that not many people knew about, one he had not been comfortable with 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 playing days with the Dallas Cowboys, do yourself a favor and look back and watch a video.
Aikman and the Cowboys, who overall no. 1 drafted in the NFL draft in 1989, struggled in his rookie year to a 1-15 record, which was also Jerry Jones’ first year as owner and Jimmy Johnson’s first year as head coach, at least against the pro- shallow.
But little by little, the franchise began to add pieces around Aikman, and the Cowboys became the most dominant team in the NFL a few years later. Dallas won three Super Bowls titles in four years in the early to mid-1990s, and Aikman won the Super Bowl MVP in the Cowboys’ first title win over the Buffalo Bills.
Troy Aikman achieved 90 wins as a starting quarterback in the 1990s, the third most of any quarterback in any decade, and once made six consecutive appearances in the Pro Bowl. The former UCLA star has been hampered by injuries in his final years in Dallas, but still holds numerous franchise records. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006 and is also a member of the famed Dallas Cowboys Ring of Honor.
Troy Aikman was diagnosed with stage two melanoma in 1998
In 1998, Troy Aikman came out of the shower and noticed a dark spot on the back of his shoulder that he had never seen before. At first he did not think too much about it, but during a family trip to Hawaii a few weeks later, he asked his sisters, who are both nurses, about it and they recommended that he have it checked as soon as possible.
Aikman went to the dermatologist a short while later and said he had stage two melanoma. Fortunately, it was discovered before the cancer got the chance to spread and he was able to avoid radiation or chemotherapy, but his doctors told him how serious things could have become and that he needed to take better precautions while in the sun, the same advice that Aikman has been giving to people for the last few years now.
He remained relatively quiet about his diagnosis for almost two decades.
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After his diagnosis in 1998, Troy Aikman did some interviews in Dallas about how he had the biopsy done, but it somehow never became a very big story. In an interview with People in 2016, Aikman said that his ‘melanoma experience was very personal’ and that he was not too interested in sharing his story for the longest time.
But over the years, he began to become aware of how many lives were affected and lost by melanoma each year. One of the people 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 undergone an examination every six months or so, and although he has frozen some suspicious growths, no further melanoma spots have been found. After keeping his diagnosis relatively secret for years, he teamed up with Novartis, a global healthcare company, in the “Melanoma Just Got Personal” campaign around the time he shared his story with People. in an effort to raise awareness about skin cancer.
Statistics courtesy of Pro Football Reference