What you may not have heard about is the bidding war that ensued between eBaumNation, TMZ, and ESPN (among others that may have been involved).  Although the numbers were not what you would see during MLB’s free agency period, it was an interesting game of cat and mouse.  Here is how The Sporting News broke it down:

Bauman (the Executive Vice President for eBaum Nation), who says he was the person responsible for securing the tape for eBaumnation.com, says TMZ paid $3,000 for their cell phone camera version of the video. Bauman says he received this information directly from TMZ’s Harvey Levin. Perhaps even more interesting is the revelation that, according to Bauman, ESPN did put a $500 bid in on the video that appeared on eBaumNation.com. In a follow up interview by phone with Bauman, he was able to disclose that eBaumNation.com paid out $5,000 for the video on their site. [SportingNews]

It is hard to say who got the best deal in this one.  While eBaumNation clearly paid the price to get the best video, I would make the claim that ESPN is the real winner.  They paid nothing and still get the video.  So they weren’t the first to show it.  It doesn’t make it impossible to download and post it on you website.

As for the camera man who provided Bauman with the footage, his identity will not be disclosed.  Being “in the basketball business,” the revelation of such information may be damaging to his career.  As a result, his anonymity was included in an agreement signed by both parties.

So was there ever really any discussion made between eBaumNation and TMZ regarding the clips?

Bauman also said he sent still shots to Levin on Wednesday to prove he had a better copy of the video. “[Levin] wanted it, but we thought it would be much more fun to ‘dunk’ one over TMZ,” Bauman said in an e-mail.

Shall we say TMZ got LeBron’d?

Hat Tip – [SportingNews]