Former Eagle Walker thinks he can still play in NFL at age 49

AT THE IMPROBABLE age of 48, Herschel Walker believes he can become "the George Foreman of football."

Walker, the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner as a Georgia junior running back, played 15 seasons of professional football, including 1992 through '94 with the Eagles, and retired at the end of the 1997 NFL season.

He remains the only NFL player to score three ways on plays of 90 or more yards in the same season, achieving that spectacular hat trick for the Eagles in 1994 by taking it to the house on a rush, a pass reception and a kickoff return.

To hear him tell it, Walker can still give a boost to any NFL team willing to ignore the date on his birth certificate. He turns 49 on March 3.

"If I continue to stay in the shape I'm in now, I know I can play when I'm 50," Walker insisted yesterday during a teleconference to promote his Saturday bout with 27-year-old Scott Carson in a Strikeforce event in San Jose, Calif.

"Right now, if you asked me if I can play today, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind I can play football, that I can help a team out," said Walker, whose spent his final three NFL seasons primarily as a receiver and kick returner for the Giants and Cowboys. "I can 100 percent guarantee you I can help a football team out . . .

"I think I'm a better conditioned athlete right now than I was when I was playing. I'm 48 now, and I'm in better shape now than I was in my early 20s playing football."

A remarkably versatile athlete who flashed Olympic-level sprinter's speed for the Georgia track team and made it to the 1992 Winter Olympics as a bobsledder, Walker's latest - or, more accurately, most enduring - competitive passion is mixed martial arts. A student of MMA since he was 15, he holds a fifth-degree black belt in tae kwon do and also has trained in such varied fighting disciplines as Muay Thai and Kenpo.

The matchup with Carson (4-1), originally scheduled for Dec. 4 but postponed when Walker (1-0) was cut above his eye in training, is the second with Strikeforce for the 1999 College Football Hall of Fame inductee. He made his debut by scoring a third-round technical knockout over another opponent more than 20 years his junior, Greg Nagy, on Jan. 30, 2010.