The Greatest Eagle

Next Sunday, one of the hundreds of millions of fans around the globe watching Super Bowl XLVI will undoubtedly be the 91-year-old Van Buren, who lives in an assisted-living facility near Lancaster, Pa., still running against ailments that include trauma-related dementia from the violent hits of the leather-helmet era, clinging to his memories of Greasy Neale, Pete Pihos, and a remarkable game they called "The Blizzard Bowl."

As a snowstorm blanketed the Philadelphia metropolis, just a few short hours before the scheduled 1:30 p.m. kickoff of the 1948 NFL Championship Game, the biggest superstar in professional football was inside his sturdy home in a suburban Delaware County neighborhood called Penfield - 10 long miles from the building hubbub at Shibe Park.

He was sound asleep.

Steve Van Buren actually woke up early that Sunday morning. You would expect that - everything that the 27-year-old halfback had worked for over the last five months had been building up to this day. Training camp up in the Adirondacks. The brutal September rematch of the 1947 NFL title game in which one of the Chicago Cardinals' players had collapsed and died. All the pain shots and finally the Eastern Division title. It was also the chance to avenge his disappointing performance in the previous year's championship game at Chicago's Comiskey Park, when Van Buren could never find his footing on an ice-covered field and gained a disappointing 26 yards on 18 carries, finally breaking his toe after he had changed to sneakers in a desperate bid for better traction.

But when he looked out his bedroom window and saw the snow falling at a furious rate, he muttered there was no way the league would go ahead with the game, not in this kind of blizzard.

He didn't even bother to pick up the phone or turn on the radio. He just climbed back into bed with his new bride, the former nightclub dancer Grace Hewson, and promptly drifted back off into slumber.

It sounds hard to believe, but not to those who knew Van Buren. The franchise player of the 1940s Eagles had always rushed forward to his own unique beat, a rhythm track laid down first in the most unlikely location of his birth on a banana-covered, crocodile-infested island off Honduras called Utila, and then on the hardscrabble, Creole-spiced streets outside of New Orleans where he grew up.

In a more formal era when Sinatra proclaimed that the way you wore your hat defined a man, Van Buren stunned Philadelphia's sports writers when the Eagles' first pick in the 1944 draft arrived in town not wearing socks. Actually, it could have been worse; his wife, Grace, later recalled once watching him disembark at the crowded Philadelphia train station barefoot, carrying his shoes in a bag. Once he turned down an endorsement deal from a hat company because everyone in Philadelphia knew that Van Buren never wore a hat, either. Eventually, the nonfashion statement became a thing for the quirky Van Buren. Called on stage in 1946 to accept one of his many football trophies, he lifted up his trousers and gave a five-word acceptance speech.

"Look, tie and socks tonight!"

Midway through a meteoric career in which he would shatter almost every existing NFL rushing record, Van Buren defied all the best efforts by sports writers and by Philadelphia's rabid fans to define him - no matter how hard they tried. No one had ever seen a running back like Van Buren: so fast (he was one of the nation's top sprinters, running the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds); so big (he was 6-1, 200 pounds); and so strong. Before Van Buren, there had never been a back with such blinding speed who ran over defenders instead of running around them. And so the sports writers and fans desperately tried to put a name to it - "Wham Bam," "Supersonic Steve," "Moving Van," "The Bayou Bombshell," "Louisiana Lightning, "Weavin' Stephen," "Blockbuster," "The Flying Dutchman." But none of Van Buren's football nicknames ever stuck. Maybe that's because he focused 100 percent of his energy between the goal posts and zero percent crafting his image off the field. Van Buren didn't care what else you thought - as long as you thought he was doing his job. Philadelphia's fans and the media never understood where Van Buren got his on-field swagger, because he never cared to tell anyone.

He came from a family of honest-to-goodness pirates of the Caribbean - British buccaneers who wound up in the Bay Islands off Honduras and battled Spanish conquistadors in the crystal-clear waters that were famously plied by the likes of Captain Henry Morgan, future star of TV rum commercials. The ancestors of Steve Van Buren were the Boddens; family legend, which is as murky as the Caribbean waters are pristine, says that the Boddens changed their surname to Van Buren during a dispute with the British crown over turtle-fishing rights. By the start of the 20th century, the Van Burens had long left the pirate business. Steve Van Buren was born the son of a fruit inspector in the coastal city of La Ceiba on Dec. 28, 1920, the very same year that the National Football League was founded.

Van Buren actually spent his early childhood with his four siblings - three sisters and his inseparable younger brother Ebert - on the more remote, coconut-tree shrouded Bay Island of Utila. Years later, Van Buren regaled his family with tales from a primitive paradise. At night, he told them, it was impossible to go to the outdoor bathroom because so many crocodiles were roaming under the porch, migrating from the ocean to a nearby bay. But as Van Buren grew older, he grew braver. Soon, he worked up a scheme of climbing up trees and knocking the iguanas to the ground, where [his brother] Ebert would club them to death. Steve's mother refused to cook the dead reptiles, so the boys brought them to locals who knew how to prepare the island delicacy.

But at the dawn of the hardscrabble 1930s, paradises rarely lasted. When Steve was 10, his mother became seriously ill and the family went north to New Orleans, where she had been raised. She died a short time later, and Steve's father vanished from the scene. The children were split up; the sisters went with an aunt and uncle while Steve and Ebert were taken in by their grandmother in the working-class suburb of Metarie, in the shadow of the tall Mississippi River levees. The Great Depression hit hard in industrial New Orleans, and Van Buren found himself battling poverty. He was an indifferent student - an oft-repeated legend has Van Buren skipping school to perfect his hobby of taking out streetlights with rocks - but he excelled at one thing: Thrill-seeking. His favorite hobby was hopping barges bound for the wide, muddy middle of the Mississippi River bend, and then swimming back to shore in gar-infested waters. His second-favorite hobby was strapping on a pair of roller skates and hitching rides on the bumpers of roadsters in the streets of the Big Easy.

One uncle introduced young Steve to the sport of boxing, and another was an academic who brought Steve deep into the bayou swamps to help tie up alligators for his research. But when the feisty Van Buren tried out for football as a high-school sophomore, he was only 125 pounds and cut from the team. He dropped out of school for two years to work in the hot blasts of a wrought-iron foundry - and the work bulked him up. Van Buren was 168 pounds when he re-enrolled at Warren Easton High School, and bulked up his grades, too - bringing his average above 90. But Van Buren didn't really plan to go to college until the day a scout for Louisiana State University showed up at a game and offered him a full scholarship on the spot.

It's probably no accident that the rise of pro football in America coincided with the nation's golden era of meritocracy. The Great Depression segued directly into the social upheaval of World War II and then the boom in college enrollment fueled by the government's G.I. Bill. It created an American dreamland where a hard-luck story from a Caribbean backwater like Steve Van Buren could - with a little gumption and a sprinkle of good fortune - get a break. In the middle of the American Century, abject poverty and the horrors of a global war created an entire generation of survivors. Those who were lucky enough to play sports did so in a time when your persistence counted more than where you ranked on a size chart, decades before future athletes were sorted out by Nike sneaker contracts at age 15. Looking back, the truly remarkable thing about pro football's Greatest Generation is not just how many of them overcame unthinkable hardships - from the death of their parents to dodging machine-gun fire on Omaha Beach - but how many had physical infirmities that would have all but disqualified them from a 21st-century NFL scouting combine.  . . . In the late 1940s the Eagles placed their future with a quarterback, Tommy Thompson, who'd been blind in one eye since childhood.

It doesn't fit the conventional storyline, but the powerful running back who became the top physical specimen in the NFL was deemed not healthy enough to fight in World War II. Like

Thompson, his future teammate, Van Buren had terrible vision problems in his left eye, although not quite blind. It's not even clear if his eye trouble was the result of an accident or infirmity, but in the early 1940s Van Buren was classified 4-F (unacceptable for military service) and headed to the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. Meanwhile, many of his peers marched off to war, including his brother Ebert, who ended up in the first batch of Marines storming the beach at Okinawa, carrying his unit's .50-caliber machine gun.

But even with college gridiron rosters depleted by World War II, Van Buren almost never got his chance. He was almost always a creature of luck - and sometimes his luck could be unbelievably bad.

At LSU, coach Bernie Moore was convinced that he had found the tailback who would lead the Tigers to the national championship: Alvin Dark, who later achieved fame not on the football field but as a shortstop for baseball's New York Giants and a pennant-winning manager. Moore turned Van Buren - now filled out to 207 pounds - into Dark's blocking back. It wasn't until Van Buren's senior year that injuries forced Moore to make him the Tigers' main ball-carrier, and the coach was mortified when he realized that he - like others before him - had so badly underestimated Van Buren's raw talent. In 1943, Van Buren led the nation in scoring with 98 points, finished second in rushing with 842 yards, and punctuated LSU's upset win over Texas A & M in the Orange Bowl with a 63-yard touchdown run. At the end of the season, Moore pulled Van Buren aside.