The Many Lives Of The High-Five

Back in June, the Wall Street Journal put together an exhaustive study looking at the correlation between high-fives and team success in the NBA, and sure enough, the world champion Mavericks high-fived each other more often than any team in the league. Weird, right?

But what about an exhaustive study of the high-five, itself? Where did it come from? How did it start? For that, we go to the latest issue of ESPN The Magazine, which gives us multiple myths to choose from. After the jump...

Here’s one story, which centers on a pro baseball player named Glenn Burke.

Burke then stepped up and launched his first major league home run. And as he returned to the dugout, Baker high-fived him. From there, the story goes, the high five went ricocheting around the world. (According to Dodgers team historian Mark Langill, the game was not televised, and no footage survives.)

The high five was a natural outgrowth of Burke’s personality. The Oakland native was an irrepressibly charismatic man who, even as a 24-year-old rookie that season, had become the soul of the Dodgers’ clubhouse. He did Richard Pryor standup from memory and would stuff towels under his shirt and waddle bowlegged around the dugout, imitating Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda. “He was a joyous, gregarious person,” sports agent Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim says of Burke, a friend since childhood. “He could high-five you without necessarily going through the motion with his hand.”

What most people didn’t know was that Burke was gay...

Thus begins a whole ‘nother story... But first, here’s another creation myth.

At a University of Louisville basketball practice during the 1978-79 season, forward Wiley Brown went to give a plain old low five to his teammate Derek Smith. Out of nowhere, Smith looked Brown in the eye and said, “No. Up high.”

The Cardinals were known as the Doctors of Dunk. They played above the rim. So when Smith raised his hand, it clicked for Brown: He understood how the low five went against the essential, vertical character of their team. “I thought, yeah, why are we staying down low? We jump so high,” says Brown, now head coach at Indiana University Southeast.

So there you have it: It happened at the University of Louisville. Or maybe on a California baseball diamond. Or maybe both? As Jon Mooallem notes in his ESPN story, it definitely didn’t happen at Murray State. The story of a man named Lamont Sleets inventing the high-five is probably the most famous these days, but it’s an admitted hoax, invented by the creators of “National High Five Day”. (And yes, that exists).

As for the other two stories, though, it could have been both. But my favorite explanation centers on Burke, whose sexuality made him an outcast in Major League Baseball before he found a second life playing in softball leagues throughout San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, high-fiving everyone he met. Eventually, his trademark became “a defiant symbol of gay pride.”

And now “a defiant symbol of gay pride” is the secret to success in the NBA?

High-five for irony!