Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity »

Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry are reporters for the Seattle Times. Their investigative work on the 2000 Huskies won two of journalism’s highest honors: the George Polk Award and the Michael Kelly Award, recognizing “the fearless pursuit and expression of truth.” In 2010 Armstrong and Perry shared in the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting, which was awarded to the staff of the Seattle Times for its coverage of the shooting deaths of four police officers. 

Armstrong is a three-time winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He previously worked at the Chicago Tribune, where he co-wrote six series on criminal-justice issues, including an investigation of the death penalty that helped prompt the state’s governor to suspend executions and eventually to empty Death Row. In 2009 he received the prestigious John Chancellor Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement.  

Perry has won national journalism awards in both New Zealand, his homeland, and the United States, where he has specialized in covering higher education. He was named a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan for the 2010–11 academic year.

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 exposé 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.”

Read additional praise.

The New York Times - Marc Tracy

What the investigative reporter Ken Armstrong and the higher-education correspondent Nick Perry have done, first in an award-winning Seattle Times series and now in Scoreboard, Baby, is lay out—in hard-boiled style and with the verve only real story telling can supply—exactly whose lives were mangled in the course of the University of Washington's historic 2000 season. Their idiosyncratic characters and plots ultimately indict a vast, impersonal system that has produced dozens of such teams. The Huskies didn't break new ground here, but in so comprehensively detailing them, the authors did.

List of Illustrations

Cast of Characters

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Hush-Hush 1

1 Freeze 7

2 Marie 17

3 Fragments 20

4 Stirrings 29

5 Louisville Slugger 41

6 Nothing but Ashes 58

7 Face-off 64

8 Taking the Field 77

9 Happily Ever After 83

10 The Twelfth Man 102

11 In Hiding 109

12 Taking a Pass 112

13 Narrowly Honest 122

14 Scoreboard, Baby 140

15 Carving Their Names 151

16 Body and Soul 165

17 Up, Down, In, Out 172

18 Taking a Shot 185

19 A Week in the Life 187

20 Love, Love, Love 196

21 I Can't Breathe 207

22 Story Lines 217

23 California Fun 228

24 A Mystical, Magical Day 245

25 Climbing the Hill 260

26 Always Hated, Never Faded 272

27 Ripples 287

28 When the Game's Over 293

Epilogue: All about the Wins 311

Notes 323

Index 367