Courtesy Winnipeg Free Press:

We were sitting in a restaurant on Pembina Highway, on the eve of the 2006 Grey Cup, and Tyrone Jones was ever the battler.

“This is the fourth quarter,” the Winnipeg Blue Bombers great said, without a trace of melodrama. “It’s third down on the one-yard line. I’m ready to go to work.”

At the time, Jones was not the man we remember from the football field, back in the day. The cancer first discovered behind his eye had aged him a good 20 years. Once a bubble-butted linebacker who dazzled with his ability and vocabulary, Jones had lost 60 pounds.

But it beat the alternative. If Jones knew anything, it was that the grass is always greener on the north side of the grave.

I walked away from meeting Jones humbled, if only because he was facing an opponent that wasn’t going to lose, yet he didn’t blink. You’d think pride might have made Jones a recluse, or vanity given him despair. He was once a football star, after all, and now a physical shadow of his former self. An innocent man facing a death sentence.

But Jones was proud. He wasn’t bitter. Never felt sorry for himself. Never yielded.

“Typical Tyrone,” shrugged Lyle Bauer, once a teammate of Jones and always a friend. “They gave him three-to-six months and that was three-and-a-half years ago.”

Early Tuesday morning, however, Bauer, the Bombers CEO, got the call. It was from another old teammate from the glory days, James West. Jones was dead, at age 46, of brain cancer.

“He (Jones) was joking down to the last minute,” West told Bauer. “That’s just him.”

West once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Jones, when both linebackers were at their athletic peak in Winnipeg. But West wasn’t there in Georgia, however, where Jones died. It would have been too hard.

“They got to the point of agreeing, ‘No more,’ ” Bauer said. “Tyrone didn’t want to be seen like that and James didn’t want to remember him like that.”

As most of us know by now, “like that” is near the end. “Like that” is the point where the cancer has already won, and is just waiting to claim the body. Jones must have known that, too. But still, no surrender.

“He couldn’t sleep very well, but he was giving the nurses a hard time,” Bauer said. “He said he wasn’t ‘Butt-N-Gut’ anymore. Typical Tyrone.”

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