The high five is one of the most popular and recognizable gestures in the world—second, perhaps, only to the traditional handshake. It is the essence of simplicity—a raised hand, traditionally the right, slapped palm to palm by another—and is often used to celebrate accomplishments or to greet or acknowledge peers. Pet owners have even trained their dogs and cats to high-five. The gesture is so popular that a National High Five Day, established in 2002 at the University of Virginia, is celebrated annually on the third Thursday of April. But who invented the high five, and when?

The Baker-Burke story

The generally accepted answer is that the high five was “invented” when Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder Dusty Baker slapped teammate Glenn Burke’s upraised palm after Baker’s 30th home run of the season on October 2, 1977. The home run made the Dodgers the first Major League Baseball team to have four players hit 30 home runs each in a single season. Moments later, Burke also hit a home run, and Baker high-fived him when he crossed home plate. Although not televised, these two gleeful moments of athletic celebration launched the high five into the public consciousness.

Burke receives credit for helping popularize the high five, but his story is not a happy one. He was a gay man playing professional sports at a time when homosexuality was still highly controversial. Although Burke was not publicly open about his sexuality, he did not go to extreme lengths to hide it. This created issues with Dodgers management, including manager Tommy Lasorda. Burke was traded to the Oakland Athletics in 1978 and was soon sent to the minor leagues, where he played just 25 games before retiring from baseball in 1980, a victim of constant bullying and harassment. In 1982 he publicly came out as gay to Inside Sports magazine, by which time he had started using drugs. After being hit by a car in 1987, his health rapidly deteriorated. Burke died from AIDS-related complications in 1995.

The Baker-Burke connection to the high five appeared as a storyline on a 2019 episode of the animated sitcom American Dad. In the episode, Klaus Heisler (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker), a goldfish with the brain of a German Olympic skier, angrily declares that he invented the high five, only to have it stolen by Dusty Baker (Gary Anthony Williams). Baker invites Klaus over for dinner to talk it out, then menacingly admits he did steal the high five and was going to take everything else in Klaus’s life as well.

Other possible origins

Examples of the high five, however, can be found throughout modern history and popular culture. There are reports that the high five was a friendly greeting among American military service members stationed in post-World War II Japan, and characters can be seen high-fiving each other in Jean-Luc Godard’s thriller Breathless (1960). Some think the high five is a visual manifestation of the African American English phrase gimme five. Another story attributes the high five to University of Louisville Cardinals basketball players Wiley Brown and Derek Smith. As the story goes, when Brown presented Smith with his palm for a low five, a gesture that had been common among Black Americans since at least World War II, Smith reportedly said, “No. Up high,” which Brown instinctively understood.

For several years, many people thought that college basketball player Lamont Sleets had invented the high five. According to a 2007 press release from the founders of National High Five Day, Sleets learned the high five as a child from his father, who had served in the Vietnam War with the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry, also known as “The Five.” Members of the unit reportedly greeted one another with a signature high five. It is said that Sleets introduced the gesture while playing basketball at Murray State University and that the high five then spread to colleges and universities across the country. In 2011, however, a writer with ESPN, after trying unsuccessfully to contact Sleets for weeks, reached out to Conor Lastowka and Greg Harrell-Edge, the founders of National High Five Day, and asked them whether the Sleets story was true. They readily admitted that they had made the whole thing up after finding Sleets’s name on a college basketball roster.