Scoreboard, Baby - 9780803228108

"A terrific work of investigative reporting and a vital public service. I finished it at once infuriated and enlightened."---David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

"This is a world-class job of reporting...Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry have made a page-turning story of what happens off the field while we are celebrating in the stands."--Richard Ben Cramer, author of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life

"The great fraud of `student-athletes,' higher education, and big-time football has never been detailed better than in Scoreboard, Baby...Theirs is a vivid, cautionary tale that, sadly, plays out in so many college athletic departments."---Frank Deford, Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer and author of Everybody's All-American

The adjectives associated with the University of Washington's 2000 football season---mystical, magical, miraculous---changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry's four-part expose of the 2000 Huskies hit the newspaper stands: "explosive...chilling" (Sports Illustrated), "blistering" (Baltimore Sun), "shocking...appalling" (Tacoma News Tribune), "astounding" (ESPN), "jaw-dropping" (Orlando Sentinel).

Now, in Scoreboard, Baby, Armstrong and Perry go behind the scenes of the Huskies' Cinderella story to reveal a timeless morality tale about the price of obsession, the creep of fanaticism, and the ways in which a community can lose even when its team wins. The authors unearth the true story from firsthand interviews and thousands of pages of documents: the forensic report on a bloody fingerprint; the notes of a detective investigating allegations of rape; confidential memoranda of prosecutors; and the criminal records of the dozen-plus players arrested that year with scant mention in the newspapers and minimal consequences in the courts. The statement of a judge, sentencing one player to thirty days in jail, says it all: "to be served after football season."