The Business Ethics Blog

King Kaufman, the sports columnist from Salon.com, has this skewering of what seems to be a ploy by Reebok to get credit for a huge charitable donation without, you know, actually making a donation:

Reebok escapes charity

I’m sorry to report that Reebok won’t be giving $1 million to Boys and Girls Clubs of America, because the virtually impossible condition the shoe company put on the donation wasn’t met.

You’ll remember that in the “RBK Touchdown Challenge,” Reebok promised the donation if its handpicked squad of six Reebok-endorsing quarterbacks threw more touchdown passes this year than any six quarterbacks had ever thrown in a season. They needed to throw 207.

This required that the six men — Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Matt Hasselbeck, Mark Bulger, Chad Pennington and Byron Leftwich, plus “subs” Alex Smith and Eli Manning if up to two got hurt, which they did — improve on their career highs by 25 percent per man. Peyton Manning’s career high was the NFL record, by the way, so it was a pretty safe bet he wasn’t going to improve on it by 25 percent.

(To read the full story you either need to subscribe to Salon, or get a free one-day trial by agreeing to watch a commercial, first.)