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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