Not exactly.
The top HS basketball tandem in the Midwest in 1951 was Clarence "Deacon" Davis and Carl "Sugar" Cain of Rockford, Ill. Combes, the Illini coach, said he would not have "colored boys" on his team (the irony is that just four years earlier Illinois upped its bid to $25,000 over Southern Cal's mere twenty grand to get ex-GI & Illini All-American Buddy Young back to Champaign. Young, an African-American from Chicago's South Side had won FB & hoops titles for Illinois during WW2, and would lead Illinois to dominate the Big Ten in football, be a top competitor in basketball from 1946 to 1949).
Combes' racial rejection was a chance of the proverbial lifetime to the new Hawkeye coach, Bucky O'Connor. The HS coach in Boone, Iowa he tagged along with his star player, Pinky Clifton, to coach the Iowa freshmen in 1948-49. When Iowa Coach Pops Harrison was literally too drunk to stand up at game time a year later, O'Connor was instant coach. O'Connor knew that the way to get Cain, his primary target, was to bring Davis to Iowa as the first step to building his Fabulous Five. He was sure that Iowa HS stars Bill Logan of Keokuk and Hugh Leffingwell of Marion would commit: the key step was to get Cain, and that was the leverage to get Bill Seaberg & Bill Scheuerman from the Quad Cities.
It worked beautifully and pretty smoothly for everyone---everyone but Deacon Davis who took a year of extreme verbal abuse, threats, racial slurs, barrages of fruit & more dangerous thrown objects throughout his senior HS season.
But that October, BT football champion Illini were due to play In Iowa Stadium. And for weeks that Autumn Iowa students prepared (in that era, students got free tickets to all athletic events; the rub was that only about 5000 seats were set aside as the student section when enrollment was over 10,000; so you were at the gate when it opened at 9 AM for the 1:30 game time, keeping warm by means of five or six flasks of bourbon, brandy, rum). For Illinois you brought a knapsack of ammunition. Still, things did not get out of hand until the second half. The Illini, frustrated by surprisingly competitive Hawkeyes, went from physical to dirty----all the signal needed for onslaughts of tomatos & overripe apples, etc followed by charges into the Illlnois seating at the Southeast corner of the stadium.
But the carnage never spilled onto the field. Neither Iowa nor Illini players were involved in the fights. And neither Evy or AD Paul Brechlet did anything to encourage the outburst. The more significant truth, however, is that neither did anything to prevent it or halt it. The next morning a telephone conference call to all the BT schools resulted in a decision that Iowa-Illinois games ---FOOTBALL ONLY --- were suspended indefinitely.
The suspension lasted seventeen years. It proved more painful to Iowa, since for 12 or so years the Hawkeyes were on the rise to multiple national rankings, and several titles & bowl victories----including midway through Iowa's only #1 national ranking in 1958. The Illini, in contrast, were bottom feeders for a decade until 1964.
