By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com
For Illini football fans in the 60s, one game is paramount to all others. But as important as the 1963 Illinois-Michigan State gridiron battle was, it paled in comparison to the events that had transpired the weekend before.
Pete Elliott's eighth-ranked Fighting Illini and Duffy Daugherty's fourth-rated Spartans entered the regular-season finale on top of the Big Ten standings with identical 4-1-1 records. The winner would advance on to Pasadena and a berth in the 1964 Rose Bowl against Washington.
On Friday, November 22, 1963, shortly after noon central time, 39 Illini players and seven coaches climbed aboard their charter flight at Willard Airport. Upon their arrival some 90 minutes later at Lansing's Capital City Airport, they were apprised of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's assassination.
"Hearing about President Kennedy was a deep, emotional blow to all our players," Elliott recalled in author Lon Eubanks' book entitled The Fighting Illini. "I can't think of anything that would even be comparable."
Like all of his teammates, Illini fullback Jim Grabowski was devastated.
"Like the rest of America, there was silence and disbelief and shock," Grabowski said. "I couldn't believe that something like this could happen in the United States."
He and his teammates were confident that they could beat the Spartans, but the news put everything into its proper perspective.
"We were ready to play," Grabowski said. "We knew it was the biggest game of our career. Illinois had not been to the Rose Bowl in 12 years, so we were excited. But after receiving that news, I don't think that I could have played. All of a sudden, there were more important things than football."
University of Illinois President David Dodds Henry and Michigan State University President John Hannah spoke on the phone, weighing the options of whether or not the Saturday game should be postponed. Somewhat surprisingly, they agreed that the game would be played as scheduled. However, according to Duffy Daugherty's 1974 autobiography, Michigan Governor George Romney felt otherwise and applied political pressure to move the game to the following Thursday, Thanksgiving Day.
On Saturday morning at 10 a.m., as the Illini team members were getting taped for the game at their hotel, word came that they would be returning to Champaign. Illini linebacker Dick Butkus who had originally hoped to play ultimately changed his opinion.
"On the flight home, it started sinking in what history had been made and by all rights we shouldn't play," Butkus said. "Then the following day with Oswald, I was like 'Wow, this is unbelievable.'"
According to Grabowski, the extra practice time proved to boost Illinois's self-assurance even more.
"When we came to Spartan Stadium that Thanksgiving Day," Grabowski said, "we were all very, very confident that we could win the football game and go on to the Rose Bowl. The President had been buried and we all felt that now we have to concentrate on what's important in our lives."
The game matched Michigan State's "80 yards and a cloud of dust" offense—a reference to MSU's ground attack led by All-America halfback Sherman Lewis—against a stingy Illini defense that hadn't allowed any of its previous eight opponents more than 21 points. The talented combination of linebackers Butkus and Don Hansen, linemen Archie Sutton and Ed Washington, and defensive backs Jim Warren and George Donnelly made scoring touchdowns a difficult proposition for their opponents.
Sunny skies and 50 degrees greeted the sellout crowd of 74,342 and a defensive struggle ensued.
In Grabowski's mind, the battle boiled down to the performances of two men: Lewis and Butkus.
"Sherman Lewis was a great running back, but we had a great person to counteract that with the finest linebacker to ever play the game," he said.
A pair of Jim Plankenhorn field goals (22 and 34 yards) staked the Illini to a 6-0 halftime lead. Two minutes into the second half, following Washington's recovery of a Spartan fumble, Grabowski rambled 14 yards into the end zone to make it 13-0. That would turn out to be the game's final score.
Lewis, who had notched five touchdowns of 80 yards or more, never got untracked, gaining only 58 yards on 13 carries. The rest of MSU's vaunted offense was stymied as well, having four passes intercepted—two by Ron Fearn—fumbling three times, and accumulating only 215 total yards all afternoon.
"Our defense was superb," Elliott said years later. "We never gave them any room to run and when they tried to throw the ball, we were all over them."
Wrote Daugherty in his book, "We got our ears pinned back. Illinois went on to the Rose Bowl and I watched it on television in disgust."
