Talking NFL

If you’re a fan of hard liquor (who isn’t?), and a hater of scam artists (ditto), then this breaking news report is for you…

Like most sports bloggers, I am a huge fan of the big dawgs on the internet. (By that I mean sites like Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber, not Michael Vick’s friend Pepe.)

On Tuesday, both sites posted pictures and links to some rather odd commemorative bottles of Maker’s Mark being sold on eBay. A ‘Barbaro Kentucky Derby VIP‘ one (shown above), and a ‘Seattle Seahawks‘ bottle, christened in Blue & Silver Wax.

Now I, like many others, often enjoy this fine bourbon whiskey. But I’d never heard of them producing such sport themed bottles before. I visited the official Maker’s Mark website, yet found no mention of them. And that’s when my Spidey senses started tingling…

So I decided to reach out to the good folks in Loretto, Kentucky to find out if these were the real McCoy. I received two email responses back; the first is from an account manager:

The VIP bottle is just a standard VIP bottle with a label that someone printed up … anyone could do it … it is not a distillery special edition .. the only thing special about this bottle is that we have discontinued this style of VIP bottle and are exhausting stocks now.

Several years ago, we did do a multi-colored wax promotion in a number of regions around the country … this bottle is probably part of that series … although we never promoted it specifically as an NFL bottle (trademark issues).

Dave

I also received this email, care of Angela Augenstein, Executive Assistant to the President:

The bottles mentioned are not bottles that Maker’s Mark would have produced. These seem to be counterfeit bottles. We see this often with bottles on eBay.

Sorry to report.

Stunning, I know. People on eBay are selling fraudulent items. Whatever shall we tell the children?

There’s certainly no blame to be thrown at Deadspin or KSK for this; they most likely got the tip from a reader (or the person selling this crap on eBay, which seems more likely since both posts came out the same day). As for the d-bags who are auctioning these imaginary products off at $100 bucks a pop, they should be boiled in their own pudding, my friends.

For there are three things we simply will not tolerate here at TalkingNFL; plagiarists (speaking of which, is this how Ron Borges made up for that lost pay?), spam comments, and doctored bottles of tasty hard booze.

(Oh, and Peyton Manning - that’s 4, four things we will not tolerate…)

Maker’s Mark, Barbaro, Kentucky’s finest, then again, why would you buy a bottle named after a horse in the first place?