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Ken Armstrong (author), Nick Perry (author); SCOREBOARD, BABY; University of Nebraska Press (Sports & Recreation) $19.95 ISBN: 9780803228108
Byline: Penny Hastings
A winning sports season is marred by the illegal, sometimes violent, behavior of two dozen players on the University of Washington's 2000 football team, resulting in their arrest and/or prosecution. A drug-related shooting, domestic abuse, and rape of a sorority girl make for a page-turning tale that reads like a novel, but is tragically true.
Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity is about the 2000 Huskies, but it is also a cautionary tale about the underbelly of elite college sports -- in this case, football -- and how the obsession to win can corrupt not only the athletic program, but an entire university and beyond.
Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry, Seattle Times newspaper reporters, have written a well-researched exposA[c] that spares no one involved, including players, coaches, well-heeled boosters, prosecutors, and judges. The authors found complicity in overlooking or covering up crimes that could cause a key player to be suspended from the team or kicked out of the university. One judge, for example, sentenced a playerto thirty days in jail, but delayed the start time until after football season.
One case involved a star tight end, arrested after a freshman reported she was drugged and raped. Despite credible evidence, including a DNA match to the player, he was not prosecuted. Another player repeatedly beat and terrorized his wife, yet after being convicted of a felony and serving time, he was accepted back on the team, despite other pending charges. The judge, a UW graduate and longtime football season ticket holder, shortened a parole officer's recommendation of eight months in jail to just the fifteen days of time already served.
The mentality of winning at all costs and a culture that protects players who bring discredit to a university shows huge problems in the way athletes are recruited and discrepancies in how they are treated compared to the rest of the student body. Scholastic rules are bent; past behavior is ignored, and athletes are accepted into colleges when they are clearly not collegiate material. It's a dismal story that makes a lie out of the term "student-athlete."
Scoreboard, Baby begins with a list of characters that make it easy to follow the story. The authors' research is extensive, largely based on public records, media coverage, and hundreds of interviews. Anindex and forty-two pages of reference notes follow the text. Authors Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry won two prestigious journalism awards for their investigative work on the 2000 Huskies.
