The High Five Dates to a 1977 Dodgers Home Run, but Its True Origin Is Still Debated
The high five is one of sports’ most iconic gestures. It follows home runs, touchdowns and buzzer-beaters. It shows up in pickup games, at Little League fields and in living rooms across the country. For something used so casually and so widely, its exact origin remains surprisingly unclear — and more than one person claims to have started it.
While many credit a famous 1977 MLB moment between Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke, multiple competing stories and cultural references have emerged over time. Some are well documented. Others have been disputed or even fabricated.
The Dodgers Moment That Started the Legend
The most widely accepted origin story traces the high five to Oct. 2, 1977, at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
Dodgers left fielder Dusty Baker had just hit his 30th home run of the season. As Baker crossed home plate, his teammate Glenn Burke was waiting for him with his hand raised high in the air. Baker reached up and slapped it in celebration.
According to Britannica, the moment is often credited as the first recorded high five. Burke is also recognized for helping popularize the gesture in professional sports. The interaction, however, was not televised.
“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.”
By Baker’s telling, there was nothing planned about it. Burke put his hand up, and Baker met it. That was all.
Earlier Claims and Competing Theories
Despite the widespread acceptance of the 1977 Dodgers moment, historians and cultural references point to earlier or alternative origins for the gesture.
Some accounts suggest the high five may have existed as a gesture 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.
Another theory ties the high five to African American Vernacular English, specifically the phrase “gimme five.” The idea is that the physical motion evolved from existing cultural expressions — that the low five, an open-palmed slap at waist level, was already a familiar greeting, and the high five was simply an elevation of a gesture that already existed.
In basketball lore, one story credits University of Louisville players Wiley Brown and Derek Smith with making exactly that shift — redirecting a request for a low five upward into what became the high five.
The Louisville Basketball Claim
At a University of Louisville basketball practice during the 1978-79 season, forward Wiley Brown went to give his teammate Derek Smith a plain old low five. Smith was not interested in staying low.
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.
Whether it was Burke and Baker at Dodger Stadium in 1977, Smith and Brown on a Louisville basketball court during the 1978-79 season or an unnamed gesture exchanged between soldiers decades earlier, the precise beginning of the high five remains contested. It may never be definitively settled.
What is not in dispute is the gesture’s staying power. Today, the high five endures as a universal symbol of celebration, widely used in sports, pop culture and everyday life. The debate over who did it first continues, but the gesture itself belongs to everyone.
