Glendale Backs Rucker, Casey Boast Enough Credentials, Talent to Carry Vaqueros So Long as They Remain Unselfish and Inspire Each Other : Dashing Duo to Share Wealth

Walking side by side to an appointment, one player eyeballed his teammate’s half-eaten sandwich and popped the inevitable question:

“You got any more of that?” he said.

The one still licking his chops handed the rest of his lunch to his pal. Both laughed and kept moving.

For Glendale College running backs Pathon Rucker and Jerome Casey, there will be plenty more opportunities to share this fall. Especially on the football field.

The two are expected to form one of the best ballcarrying tandems in the state, one that probably will help the Vaqueros challenge for the Western State Conference North Division championship.

Glendale, ranked No. 16 in the state preseason coaches’ poll, will open with a nonconference game against Citrus today at 1 p.m. at Glendale High.

Rucker, a sophomore from Glendale High, is the incumbent. Casey, a sophomore who graduated from Sylmar in 1990, is the newcomer to the program but not exactly a novice.

He played two seasons ago at Western New Mexico, an NAIA Division I school, but transferred to Glendale and sat out last season while concentrating on academics.

If more fragile personalities were involved, perhaps a backfield with two highly gifted athletes would be overcrowded. Not at Glendale. At least, not yet. Rucker, Casey and Coach John Cicuto maintain that harmony will prevail.

“It will not be a problem for us. We are going to run a lot of two-back sets,” Cicuto said.

“If you don’t have to rely on one guy, that’s better. Obviously, if one runner has the hot hand in a game, you are going to go with him more.”

Besides, Cicuto says, the two possess different running styles.

Rucker, who rushed for 1,216 yards and 19 touchdowns in leading the Vaqueros to an 8-3 record and a 24-23 victory over Antelope Valley in the K-Swiss Bowl last season, has fancy footwork and great cutting ability.

Casey, who rushed 132 times for 622 yards and four touchdowns his only season at Western New Mexico, runs with more power.

Regardless of how they will be deployed, Rucker and Casey say the association will be mutually beneficial.

“It’s just more pressure off of me,” said Rucker, the taller of the two at 6-foot, 185 pounds. “When he is in there, he’s going to do his job and when I’m in there, I’m going to do mine.”

Casey (5-10, 190 pounds) pointed to another positive byproduct: “It’ll be competitive and that’s good,” he said. “It’ll bring out the best in us. There’ll be no time to slack off.”

Neither could afford that. The Vaqueros are four-deep in running backs, with freshmen Hector Valencia from Burbank and James Walker from Saugus, eager and ready to play. Valencia rushed for 444 yards last season and Walker for 621, numbers that are not earth-shattering but not altogether lost on Rucker or Casey.

They can hear the footsteps.

“If he weren’t here, I’d still have to watch it, because we have two other guys who can play,” Rucker said.

The wholesale arrival of running backs, particularly Casey, concerned Rucker initially. Although no slouch himself--he can bench-press 330 pounds and can run the 40 yards “in the 4.4s”--Rucker remembers being impressed by Casey’s reputation and capabilities but regained his bearing quickly.

“I was thinking, ‘425 bench, 4.3 speed. Damn!’ ” Rucker said about Casey, shaking his head. “I would never change positions because someone else is coming to the team, but I almost thought about it.”

Four years ago, it was Casey doing the serious thinking.

An All-City pick after rushing for 1,447 yards and 17 touchdowns his senior season at Sylmar, Casey was hotly pursued by many four-year schools and signed a letter of intent with USC. He failed to score the NCAA-required 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, however, and could not gain admission.

He sat out one season and headed for Silver City and Western New Mexico in 1991. It was a move he later regretted.

“The place just wasn’t for me,” said Casey, who is nursing a sprained ankle and won’t play today. “I felt it was a racist town and I really didn’t know how to handle that. For a small town, it wasn’t warm at all.”

He returned home, looking for a school at which he could straighten his academics and play ball. Enter Glendale and Cicuto.

“I had met Coach Cicuto back in ’89 and he had said that if things didn’t work out, to give him a call,” Casey said. “We clicked right away.”

Now, all Casey has to worry about is helping the Vaquero offense click.

Glendale averaged 232.2 yards rushing in ‘92, mostly by Rucker.

The duo could become the first pair of Glendale running backs to each gain more than 1,000 yards in the same season, and they already are aiming in that direction.

“I feel that 3,000 yards (rushing) as a team might not be out of reach,” Rucker said.

It might not be, as long as they share the workload like they do a sandwich.