Yes, Dhani Jones made it down from Mount Everest.
Not only that, he made it down in time to get front-row seats at Tuesday's results show for ABC's Dancing With The Stars. And teammate Chad Ochocinco came down from the mountaintop on stage during commercial breaks to shake his hand and then yell out his name.
"Chad looks good. He's happy. He's doing a good job," Jones said Wednesday as the Bengals middle linebacker began another TV junket of his own. "I don't think there's any question that is going to help his game. Any time you cross train and use different kinds of muscles, it's going to help. We're both getting better from what we're doing now."
If anyone should know the importance of cross training, it is the 32-year-young Jones who starts the second season of his hit Travel Channel series Dhani Tackles The Globe this Monday at 11 p.m. with a 110-mile bike race in Italy.
It sounds a little more dangerous than last season, so Bengals president Mike Brown and head coach Marvin Lewis better be sitting down when they watch the season's last two shows. But by then they'll know that he's safe because he'll already be back on the field when the show airs from Mexico City June 14 and from Nepal June 21.
Along with doing lucha libre, a form of freestyle wrestling, Jones also did some bullfighting in Mexico. It's not quite like trying to tackle Jets running back Shonn Greene, "but a lot of the ideas are the same. You still have to have some quick feet," he said.
But the June 21 finale from Everest is definitely what everyone is waiting for. Jones calls it the most demanding of the 20 episodes over the two seasons and he doesn't want to reveal too much. The plan had been to climb a mile from the top, a good three or four miles into the air. But the most riveting moment may have come on the way down, where he came to the aid of a man struggling to go up to the world's highest peak.
"He couldn't make it and one of the other people with him tried to carry him and he couldn't do it," Jones said. "I looked at him and knew I could. He was an older guy, about 55, six feet, 200 pounds, and I carried him for about 15 to 20 minutes to the next village. It wasn't a sharp descent. It was more like a rolling slope."
Talk about carrying a team on your back.
"One of the objects of the show is to reflect the different backgrounds of the places we go and show the humanity we all have," Jones said. "Since I get involved in the culture, at some point I'm going to have a responsibility and this was one of those times."
One of the more popular elements of the first season had been Jones' forays off the field into the society and he says there is more of that in Season 2. He says the varied religions of Senegal, which includes witchcraft, provided an intriguing stop.
The show was quite popular in Cincinnati last spring and Jones says it's nice to have two employers in the same town.
"The Scripps family and the Brown family," he said.
Both have to like the results. In the two previous offseasons when Jones shot the show, he responded with two of his three biggest seasons when it came to tackles. In 2008, when he shot six shows, he racked up a career-high 165 tackles. Last offseason, when he shot four episodes, he came up with 142, the third best of his 10 seasons.
The schedule:
April 19: Italy (Bike Racing); April 26: Senegal (Lutte Wrestling); May 3: Iceland (Strongman); May 10: Jamaica (Cricket); May 17: Croatia (Water Polo); May 24: Scotland (Highland Games); May 31: Brazil (Beach Volleyball); June 7: South Africa (Soccer)l June 14: Mexico (Lucha Libre); June 21: Nepal (Mt. Everest Climb)
