You can watch hours of baseball footage from the 1950s and 1960s and see almost no overhead hand-slaps. Players shook hands. They patted backs. They clapped their own hands together. But the modern high five—the raised arm, the open palm, the celebratory smack—didn’t exist in mainstream American sports until October 2, 1977. And it happened during a losing playoff game.
The short answer
The high five was popularized by Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker during an LA Dodgers playoff game in 1977, though earlier informal hand-slap celebrations may have existed in other contexts. The gesture exploded in the 1980s thanks to television sports coverage and became the default celebratory gesture across team sports.
The Glenn Burke moment
October 2, 1977. Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers were losing a playoff series to the Philadelphia Phillies. Dusty Baker hit a home run in the sixth inning—his 30th of the season. Glenn Burke, waiting on deck, met him near the dugout and raised his hand overhead. Baker, unsure what to do, slapped it.
That was it. No cameras captured the moment up close. No one announced it. Burke and Baker have both recounted the story in interviews years later—Burke described it as spontaneous, a burst of energy in the middle of a tense game. The Dodgers would lose the series. But the gesture stuck.
Within a few years, the high five was everywhere.
Why the 1970s, specifically
The high five didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Several cultural currents converged to make that particular gesture visible, repeatable, and eventually dominant.
First, television. ESPN launched in 1979. Cable sports networks brought close-up, slow-motion replays of celebratory moments into millions of living rooms. The high five is a visible gesture—it happens above the shoulders, it’s big, it reads on camera. A handshake doesn’t. A quiet pat on the back doesn’t. The high five was built for broadcast.
Second, the integration of American professional sports. By the late 1970s, Black athletes dominated baseball, basketball, and football rosters. Many of the celebratory gestures that became mainstream sports traditions—dap handshakes, hand-slap variations, the high five itself—originated in Black athletic and cultural circles. Lamont Dozier, the Motown songwriter, has claimed that he and his peers were doing similar hand-slaps in Detroit’s music and sports scenes in the 1960s. The mainstream adoption happened when those gestures became visible in nationally televised games.
Third, the cultural moment. The 1970s and 80s were the era of youth culture ascendant—informal, energetic, anti-institutional. The high five fit that mood. It wasn’t a handshake. It wasn’t formal. It was celebratory without being serious, and it required almost no explanation.
The broader history of celebratory gestures
The high five belongs to a long lineage of physical celebration. Hand-clapping as audience approval dates back to ancient Rome and likely earlier. The handshake—formalized in medieval commerce as a gesture of non-aggression—became the default non-romantic physical greeting by the 20th century.
But the high five filled a specific gap. It’s more celebratory and energetic than a handshake. It’s less intimate than a hug. It works in public. It works with strangers. It works when you’re excited and need to do something with that energy, and the person next to you needs to do something too.
Other sports traditions evolved similarly. The chest bump, the fist bump, the elaborate touchdown dances—all of these are variations on the same theme: athletes needed gestures that were visible, repeatable, and appropriate for the emotional register of competition. The high five became the template.
The interesting wrinkle
Here’s the thing that gesture historians point out: the high five genuinely didn’t exist in its recognizable form before the mid-1970s. It’s not a rediscovery of some ancient celebratory tradition. It’s a specific invention that happened at a specific time, in a specific cultural context, and then spread because the conditions were right.
And those conditions were new. Television made sports a mass spectator experience. Professional sports integrated rapidly in the 1960s and 70s, bringing new cultural norms into mainstream visibility. Youth culture gained economic and social power. All of those forces converged in the late 1970s, and the high five—this tiny, spontaneous gesture in a Dodgers dugout—caught the wave.
Glenn Burke’s high five wasn’t planned. It wasn’t strategic. It was a moment of desperate optimism in the middle of a losing series. And it became the way millions of people celebrate for the next fifty years.
What it means for how gestures catch on
The history of the high five is useful because it’s a case study in how cultural norms actually spread. It wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t universal. It required visibility (TV cameras), social permission (informal celebration becoming acceptable in professional sports), cultural moment (the energy of the late 70s), and repetition (athletes kept doing it because it worked).
The high five also shows how gestures carry social meaning. It remains youth-coded and informal. You still shake hands in a job interview. You still hug close friends. The high five exists in a specific emotional register—celebratory, casual, momentary. That specificity is why it works.
FAQ
When was the high five invented?
The high five appears in sports around the mid-1970s, with Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker credited with popularizing it during an LA Dodgers game in October 1977, though earlier informal hand-slap celebrations may have existed.
Who invented the high five?
No single inventor, but Glenn Burke’s 1977 moment in baseball is the most documented origin. Lamont Dozier claims earlier use in Detroit music and athletic circles in the 1960s.
Why do athletes use high fives?
It’s a quick, celebratory physical affirmation that’s visible to crowds and cameras. It carries less formality than a handshake while being more energetic than verbal praise, making it ideal for televised sports.
Why did the high five become popular in the 1970s?
Integration of American sports, television’s close-up coverage, the rise of Black athletic superstars who popularized informal celebratory gestures, and the broader youth culture movement all converged in the late 1970s.
The next time you raise your hand to slap someone else’s in celebration, you’re repeating a gesture that didn’t exist fifty years ago—and now exists everywhere. Some gestures take centuries to become universal. The high five took about a decade.