Van Buren a champ, even toward the end

This is an excerpt from the recent e-book - a Kindle single for Amazon.com, titled "Give It To Steve!" - about Steve Van Buren and the 1948 championship game, by Daily News senior writer Will Bunch. It describes meeting Van Buren at his nursing home outside of Lancaster in January:

Steve Van Buren is sitting up in a recliner, dressed in grey trousers, a button-down shirt, and a white Philadelphia Eagles hat. He wears an Eagles cap every day single day, framing the broad face that still reflects the dark-complexioned handsomeness he brought north from Honduras so many years ago.

His room on the second floor - which he shared with another recent stroke victim - is lined with bric-a-brac that includes an Eagles pennant, a Snickers football clock, and a large cork board lined with photos; a few of the snapshots are football-related, including Steve and current Eagles' owner Jeff Lurie, but most of them are "Boomp" with his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren.

His son-in-law Nathan Pipitone smiled and threw open a wooden chest to reveal green and white pom-poms that the nurses occasionally use to lead their famous resident in an Eagles cheer. The NFL Network, cable TV's 24-hour ultimate realization of Eagles' founder Bert Bell's dream, was playing on low volume on a flat screen.

"Are you awake?" Pipitone asks.

"I'm always awake."

The words come a little slowly since a recent stroke, but Van Buren's voice is clear. His left arm is curled up, a Parkinson's-type symptom that doctors said could be cured with a shot - except that after the frenzy of Novocain 50 years ago Van Buren now refuses to take one more needle. His right handshake is firm, vigorous - strength is still important. "You have a strong grip," he says later. When I mention I heard that he was a boxer in his New Orleans youth, his eyes alit. "I could beat anybody!" But when I tell him I admire his toughness, he replied, "But I got hurt."

Van Buren seemed to enjoy hearing the names of Greasy Neale or Pete Pihos - "I know all of them" - but he also had strong opinions about the Birds of today.

Some of his thoughts that he has voiced to Pipitone probably won't alarm you ("He looks like a girl," he uttered after one excessive end-zone celebration) but others might. One Sunday he was surprised to hear his name coming from the TV, and they told him the Eagles' LeSean McCoy had finally broken his 66-year-old team record of 18 touchdowns. "Good!" he declared. Van Buren also loves watching the Eagles controversy-shrouded running quarterback Michael Vick, maybe because Vick is more likely to lower his shoulder into a defender than slide into the turf and avoid contact. "Very good!" he enthused when I mentioned Vick's name.

He shakes hands again.

"Gracias!"

Pipitone tells me that Van Buren lapses back into Spanish from time to time. In the shadows of the nursing home, his mind moves way back past football and past New Orleans and all the way back to Utila, the Caribbean island where he was born - to long sunny days and crocodile nights, with iguanas in the palm trees and his mother still in the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Pipitone and I are driving back, and there was one last thing I wanted to ask. Did the hero of the legendary 1948 "Blizzard Bowl" know about the 2010 the game that the Eagles postponed against the Vikings just as the first few flakes were starting to fall? Van Buren's son-in-law said that of course he knew about it.

"What did he say?"

"He laughed!"

"He laughed?"

"Yeah. He didn't say a word. He just laughed . . . ho, ho, ho!"