You’ve done it thousands of times. After a game-winning shot, a solid joke, a perfectly executed parallel parking job. You’ve probably never thought twice about who did it first. The high-five is so woven into sports and everyday life that it feels like it must have existed forever — like a handshake or a wave.
It hasn’t. The high-five is a surprisingly modern gesture, and its exact origin is one of the more entertaining unsettled debates in sports. While many credit a famous 1977 moment between Los Angeles Dodgers teammates Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke, multiple competing stories and cultural references have emerged over time — some well documented, others later disputed or even fabricated. Nobody has definitively settled the question.
The 1977 High-Five Moment Most People Know
According to Britannica, the most widely accepted origin story traces the high-five to October 2, 1977. That’s the day Dodgers left fielder Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the season. As Baker crossed home plate, teammate Glenn Burke greeted him with an upraised hand. Baker slapped it in celebration.
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The moment is often credited as the first recorded high-five, and Burke is recognized for helping popularize the gesture in professional sports. But there’s a catch: the interaction was not televised. The most famous origin story of one of the world’s most recognizable gestures exists only in the memories of the people who were there.
“His hand was up in the air, and he was arching way back,” Baker told ESPN in 2020. “So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do.”
Even by Baker’s own telling, it was completely spontaneous — a reaction, not a rehearsed gesture.
Earlier and Alternative Claims of the High-Five
Despite the popularity of the MLB origin story, historians and cultural references suggest the gesture may be considerably older.
Some accounts suggest the high-five may have existed among U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan after World War II. Others note visual similarities in earlier media, including a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless where characters appear to perform a similar gesture — nearly two decades before Baker and Burke’s moment.
Another theory ties the high-five to African American Vernacular English, specifically the phrase “gimme five.” This line of thinking suggests the physical motion evolved from existing cultural expressions — that the upward palm slap wasn’t invented in a single moment but grew gradually out of a greeting with roots far deeper than any one sports celebration.
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Louisville Basketball Stars Made Their Own Claims About the High-Five
In basketball lore, one story credits University of Louisville players Wiley Brown and Derek Smith with creating the gesture. At a University of Louisville basketball practice during the 1978-79 season, forward Brown went to give a plain old low five to his teammate 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,” Brown told ESPN. Brown insists it’s Smith who invented the high-five and Smith who spread it around the country.
Today, while the exact origin remains contested, the high-five endures as a universal symbol of celebration, widely used in sports, pop culture and everyday life. Whether it was born in a Los Angeles dugout, a Louisville basketball gym or on a military base overseas, the gesture now belongs to everyone who has ever raised a hand and found another one waiting.
Where it actually started? Nobody can agree — and at this point, that might be part of what makes the story worth telling.
