Scoreboard, Baby

Written with Nick Perry

• Winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction
• New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

The University of Washington’s march to the 2001 Rose Bowl answered one of sport’s most enduring questions: If winning is everything, what are we left with? Scoreboard, Baby exposes the rot beneath a celebrated season—and the ruins left behind, showing how a community’s blind embrace of a football team compromised judges, prosecutors, police agencies, a proud university and the media.

The backstory: At the Seattle Times, Nick Perry and I wrote a four-part series called “Victory and Ruins” (parts 1, 2, 3, 4) that ESPN called “astounding,” Sports Illustrated, “explosive,” and the Baltimore Sun, “blistering.” To tell the off-the-field story of the UW’s last Rose Bowl-winning team, we draw on 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, said it all: “to be served after football season.” The series won a George Polk Award and the Michael Kelly Award for “the fearless pursuit and expression of truth.” Knowing there was more to tell, Nick and I expanded our reporting further, to write this book.

Buy the Book

“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 storytelling 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.”
—The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“The most harrowing book I have ever read about college sports.”
—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights

“However familiar the underlying conflict might seem, there’s an added layer of tension and tragedy to the narrative that makes Scoreboard, Baby a particularly distressing tale and one that should be required reading for anyone linked to university life.”
—Chronicle of Higher Education

The Young Adult Library Services Association named Scoreboard, Baby one of its “Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learners,” placing it on a list with such notable works as Behind the Beautiful Forevers and The Round House. A librarian who took part in selecting the books called Scoreboard, Baby “incredibly compelling, fascinating, and disturbing,” and said it “was one of—if not the—best books I read while serving on committee.”

“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

“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 Online

“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

“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

“A remarkable book … As an investigative reporter of 40 years experience, little shocks me. What I learned from this book shocked me…”
—The Seattle Times

“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, author of Everybody’s All-American