The Gesture That Nearly Became a Monopoly
In the spring of 1977, Glenn Burke, a third-base coach for the Louisville Redbirds minor league team, walked into a downtown patent office with what he thought was a simple request. He wanted to trademark his team's signature celebration—a overhead hand-slap between players that had become their unofficial good-luck ritual. The paperwork he filed that day accidentally launched the most absurd intellectual property dispute in American sports history.
Photo: Louisville Redbirds, via www.baseballtrips.net
Photo: Glenn Burke, via legacyprojectchicago.org
Burke's motivation was purely sentimental. The gesture had emerged naturally during the team's remarkable 1976 season, when players began spontaneously slapping raised palms after successful plays. Burke thought trademarking it would create a nice commemorative item for the team's record books. He had no idea he was about to claim ownership of what would become the world's most ubiquitous celebration.
When Good Intentions Meet Legal Machinery
The trademark application, filed under "recreational gestures and athletic celebrations," was approved with stunning bureaucratic efficiency. Patent office clerk Margaret Hensley later admitted she'd never seen a similar application and simply processed it according to standard procedures for "distinctive commercial expressions."
The approval letter granted Burke exclusive rights to "the coordinated striking of raised palms between two or more individuals in celebration of athletic achievement." In legal terms, he now owned the high-five.
For nearly two years, nobody noticed. The gesture spread organically through baseball, basketball, and beyond, with millions of Americans unknowingly performing Burke's trademarked celebration. It wasn't until a University of Kentucky business student spotted the filing during a research project that the legal implications became clear.
The Panic That Rippled Through Professional Sports
When news of Burke's trademark broke in 1979, sports leagues faced an unprecedented crisis. Did every high-five now constitute trademark infringement? Were athletes technically required to pay licensing fees for celebrating? The NBA's legal department spent six months analyzing game footage to calculate potential damages.
The situation became even more complicated when three other individuals came forward claiming to have invented the high-five first. Dusty Baker, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, insisted he'd created the gesture during a 1977 game with teammate Glenn Burke (a different Glenn Burke). A University of Louisville basketball player claimed his team had been high-fiving since 1975. A Little League coach from Wisconsin produced photographs allegedly showing high-fives from 1973.
The Legal Battle Nobody Wanted to Fight
Burke found himself at the center of a intellectual property war he never intended to start. Sports Illustrated called him "The Man Who Owned Happiness." Late-night comedians joked about "high-five police" monitoring playgrounds for unauthorized celebrations.
The legal challenges multiplied when Burke's lawyers realized the trademark might be unenforceable anyway. How do you prove someone performed a specific gesture? How do you distinguish between a high-five and other palm-slapping activities? Could parents be sued for celebrating their children's soccer goals?
Meanwhile, Burke himself became increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. "I just wanted something nice for the team," he told reporters. "I never meant to own how people celebrate."
The Resolution That Satisfied Nobody
In 1986, after nine years of legal wrangling, Burke's trademark was quietly invalidated on grounds that the gesture had become "too widely adopted to maintain exclusive ownership." The Patent Office ruled that the high-five had achieved "generic status," like aspirin or escalator—brand names that became so common they lost their legal protection.
Burke received no compensation for surrendering his trademark, though he did get a ceremonial plaque from the Baseball Hall of Fame recognizing his "contribution to athletic celebration." The plaque, which hangs in Cooperstown's administrative offices, remains the only official acknowledgment of the high-five's disputed origins.
Photo: Baseball Hall of Fame, via d36tnp772eyphs.cloudfront.net
The Celebration That Almost Wasn't Free
The Burke trademark case exposed the absurd boundaries of intellectual property law. For nearly a decade, one of humanity's most natural expressions of joy existed in legal limbo, technically owned by a man who never wanted to own it.
Today, Americans perform an estimated 2.5 billion high-fives annually, from Little League games to corporate boardrooms. Each one represents a small victory over the legal system that briefly tried to commodify human celebration.
Burke, now 71, still follows baseball and still high-fives players when his local team wins. "People ask if I regret filing that paperwork," he says. "But honestly, I'm proud that for a few years, I owned the patent on happiness. Not many people can say that."
The case files, stored in a Louisville law office, contain hundreds of depositions from athletes, coaches, and fans trying to establish the "true" origin of the high-five. Reading them today feels like archaeological evidence of the moment when something perfectly spontaneous nearly became perfectly bureaucratic—and somehow survived intact.
