It was the last day of the regular season, and Dodgers leftfielder Dusty Baker had just gone deep off the Astros' J.R. 2, 1977, in front of 46,000 screaming fans at Dodger Stadium. IF THIS PRANK HAS A VICTIM, it's Glenn Burke, a young outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the late 1970s whose astonishing physique and 17-inch biceps earned him the nickname King Kong.įor at least a generation before the Sleets story surfaced, the conventional wisdom had been that Burke invented the high five on Oct. He seemed amused that I'd gotten the actual Lamont Sleets on the phone, if only briefly. "We just found the guy and made up a story about his dad," Lastowka said. They'd concocted the whole story, then scoured college basketball rosters to plug in a name. "You know," Harrell-Edge said, "you are actually the first person to ask us that." In search of a definitive lead, I reached out to the founders of National High Five Day: Conor Lastowka, a comedy writer, and Greg Harrell-Edge, who was once named "Laziest Person in America" in a nationwide search by Jimmy Kimmel Live! Talking to them, I suddenly had the good sense to ask whether the Sleets story was even true. Years ago, Frommeyer added, the school retired Sleets' jersey, but it was mysteriously stolen off the gymnasium wall shortly thereafter. Steve Frommeyer, Eminence High's principal, said everyone asked about the high five when the school inducted the guard into its hall of fame four years ago, but Sleets didn't show up for the ceremony. (Greene said his memory is so fuzzy that he "couldn't confirm or deny" the high-five story.) Old-timers in Eminence, I was told, still point to invisible marks on the high school basketball court from where Sleets routinely sank jumpers - spots well beyond where the three-point line has since been painted. "He was kind of a private person" was all his Murray State coach, Ron Greene, could tell me. Gradually, the man attained an elusive, gurulike aura in my mind. I combed local newspaper archives and funeral notices, looking in vain for someone who knew him. In the following weeks, I dialed him more than a dozen times. He was on his way to work, he said, and told me to try back at 4:30 that afternoon. When he answered my phone call, Sleets sounded tired. Sleets was budging his way atop the high-five hierarchy. But the Sleets story quickly shot around the Internet and into local newspapers, displacing, or at least undermining, all other claims. Others trace it to the women's volleyball circuit in the 1960s. Magic Johnson once suggested that he invented the high five at Michigan State. It might seem impossible to pinpoint when the low five ratcheted itself upright and evolved into the high five, but there are countless creation myths in circulation. The low five had been a fixture of African-American culture since at least World War II. In short, Lamont Sleets was both the inventor of the high five and its Johnny Appleseed. Years later, Sleets started high-fiving his Murray State teammates, and when the Racers played away games, other teams followed. "Hi, Five!" he'd yell, unable to keep all their names straight. loved to jump up and slap his tiny palms against their larger ones. They'd blow through the front door doing their signature greeting: arm straight up, five fingers spread, grunting "Five." Lamont Jr. The men of The Five often gathered at the Sleets home when Lamont Jr. Apparently, Sleets had been reluctantly put in touch with the holiday's founders, and he explained that his father, Lamont Sleets Sr., served in Vietnam in the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry - a unit nicknamed The Five. I'd first read about him in 2007 in a press release from National High Five Day, a group that was trying to establish a holiday for convivial palm-slapping on the third Thursday in April. I was calling Sleets because I wanted to talk to the man who invented the high five. he played college basketball for Murray State University between 19 and he reportedly created one of the most contagious, transcendently ecstatic gestures in sports - and maybe, for that matter, American life. WHEN I FIRST PHONED Lamont Sleets this spring, I knew only the following: He is a middle-aged man living in the small town of Eminence, Ky. The wild, mysterious history of sports' most enduring gesture: the high fiveĮditor's note: This story, on the mysterious origins of the high five, first appeared in the Augissue of ESPN The Magazine.
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