The on-again, off-again rivalry that is IU and Illinois

“I think Indiana will suck. Don’t put that on the Internet.”

Those words came from Illinois coach Bruce Weber at a fan function late last June.
The utterance chucked tinder onto the barn fire that has been the IU-Illinois rivalry in recent years. IU fans will always hate Purdue as a matter of instinct, but the demilitarized zone that has formed in the 150 or so miles between Bloomington and Champaign, Ill., seems to have overtaken the usual loathing for the Boilers – at least when it comes to basketball.

But has it always been this way? When did this perceived blood hatred begin, and does it truly constitute a rivalry?

Current students, for the most part, define the rivalry by the defection of Eric Gordon. The former IU guard, now with the Los Angeles Clippers, committed to Illinois during his junior year at Indianapolis’ North Central High School, citing program instability as the main reason he wouldn’t consider IU.

Enter Kelvin Sampson, and suddenly Gordon answered the call of the basketball powerhouse an hour south of Indy, leaving the Illini coach and his fans stomping mad.

Of course, this led to the highly publicized feud between Weber and Sampson, one in which the former did almost everything save publicly address his disdain for the latter.
Weber set land-speed handshaking records every time he had to greet Sampson post-game.

Gordon’s family had to be escorted from the stands at Illinois after fans a few rows back decided to offer them sundry objects and concession stand food – aerially.
And surely, no one has forgotten the Gordon-Chester Frazier pregame chest bump in Champaign.

But there is a history of malice between the two programs so closely related in school size and character that their arenas bear the same name.

Bob Knight and Lou Henson (Illinois’ version of the General) feuded less than politely during their respective Big Ten careers.

Former IU player and assistant Dan Dakich said the discord between the two coaches began with the 1986 recruiting of an Illinois high school student, Lowell Hamilton, who ended up in Champaign. Knight believed Henson and Illinois had acted improperly in Hamilton’s courtship – and he said so publicly and privately, even when the NCAA cleared Illinois of wrongdoing.

Knight later reportedly tried to apologize to Henson, but the seeds were sown.
Henson was quoted in 1986 as saying Knight “gets away with more on the bench than anyone,” and later called him a “classic bully.”

The March 1991 confrontation that preceded that last memorable quote is one Dakich remembers vividly.

“Coach Knight basically walked off the court as opposed to shaking hands at Illinois,” said Dakich, “and then coach Knight and I were back in the locker room, and then Henson came in with his team.” The confrontation was inevitable, he said, because “you had to go down the same hallway” to get to the two locker rooms. It was there, Dakich said, the two coaches had to be physically restrained from going after each other.

“That kind of really started the rivalry,” Dakich said. “I don’t know whether it subsided a little bit.”

University Chancellor Ken Gros Louis, who has been at IU since 1963, said he does remember periods of feuding between IU and Illinois during Knight’s years in charge. But he also said the most inflammatory moment he could recall between the two programs was the Gordon saga. Dakich said much the same thing – that the intensity of the rivalry, at least in the last 365 days, was “simply and solely because of Eric.”

An hour-long Google search of variations on “IU-Illinois rivalry” almost exclusively yielded references to Gordon and the Knight-Henson tunnel incident.

For his part, IU coach Tom Crean has played down the animosity between the border-state schools, rarely talking about the rivalry. He repeated after IU’s 76-45 loss in Champaign on Jan. 10 that he had no comment on Weber’s preseason prediction.

The animosity between the two fanbases hasn’t waned since, but Dakich said IU-Illinois still doesn’t have the feel of traditional IU rivalries like Kentucky and Purdue.

“If the teams are playing for a Big Ten Championship, yeah it’s gonna be a different feeling,” Dakich said of IU-Illinois. “I don’t think you could say that there’s any way that the depth of the rivalry matches Purdue or Kentucky.”