Rucker Wickline (1989) - Marshall Athletics Hall of Fame

Rucker Wickline

Induction:
1989
Class:
1961

An All-State football player at Barboursville High School, Wendell Rucker Wickline II chose to stay close to home and play his college ball for Coach Charlie Snyder and the Thundering Herd. A center and linebacker who rarely left the field, Wickline won third team All-Mid-American Conference honors as a sophomore starter in his first year with the Marshall varsity and had become a first team All-MAC honoree by the time he was a senior in 1961. In an era when Marshall won only five games over three seasons, Wickline -- who was 6-feet-2 and 210 pounds -- still stood out to MAC coaches as one of the most physically dominating players in the league, and he then became a 17th-round selection of the Detroit Lions in the 1962 NFL Draft. Needing a summer job to make money before reporting to the Lions, who had a contract waiting for him, Wickline, an honors student with a science degree, took a job with the Standard Ultramarine and Color Co. in Huntington. Wickline impressed his employers, who offered him a job making as much as he could earn as a professional football player, with more job security, and Wickline passed up on the NFL opportunity. Wickline flourished in his new profession, rising to become president of an ink and printing company in Elizabethtown, Ky. Wickline was inducted into the Marshall Athletic Hall of Fame in 1989.