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A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity
by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry
Winner of the 2011 Edgar Award, Best Crime Fact category
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."
Edgar Awards, 2011
"While the focus is specifically on the University of Washington program, this story carries importance and relevance to fans far beyond Seattle. Investigative journalism at its most revealing." - Booklist
"Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, some of America's top universities still perpetuate the myth of the "student-athlete." Armstrong and Perry sound the death knell of that hoary fable by exposing the win-at-all-costs deprivation that thrived at UW under golden-boy coach Rick Neuheisel." - Kirkus Reviews
"[Scoreboard, Baby lays] out in hard-boiled style and with the verve only real storytelling can supply exactly whose lives were mangled in the course of the University of Washington's historic 2000 season." - New York Times
This information about Scoreboard, Baby was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ken Armstrong is a reporter for the Seattle Times, as was Nick Perry from 2002 until 2011. Perry is now a correspondent for the Associated Press. 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.
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