Scoreboard, Baby

The adjectives associated with the University of Washingtons 2000 football season-mystical, magical, miraculous-changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perrys four-part expos 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.