Part I: The question

One evening in the winter of 1970, an NBA rookie named Fred Carter showed up for a game, bounced around the Baltimore Bullets locker room, and then did something unexpected: He strolled up to Wes Unseld, the Bullets’ 6-foot-7 center, and extended his fist.

“It was something I just did,” Carter says.

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Carter, 75 and retired, cannot remember the opponent or the date or even the city. And considering it was 50 years ago, that’s not surprising. It was an impromptu act. He didn’t realize he was pushing sports into the future.

Carter can remember bumping fists with Unseld and then doing the same with Gus Johnson and Earl Monroe. He can recall wanting to hype up his teammates, to get them excited in the moments before the game. As a rookie, Carter says, this was his job. In an eight-year career that stretched across three franchises, he built a reputation as a springy, high-energy point guard, the kind of athlete that teammates said could play in any era. That season, he earned the nickname “Mad Dog” when he bit teammate Ray Scott in the shoulder during a drill in training camp. Scott would tell teammates that Carter was “worse than a mad dog.” In time, the nickname shortened to “Doggy,” and Carter channeled his enthusiasm into another act: the pound, a greeting more commonly known now as the fist bump.

“We didn’t have a name for it,” Carter told me over the phone recently. “You just put your fists up and bumped fists.”

I had called Carter for a few reasons: In the world of COVID-19, the handshake has all but disappeared. The high five — the exuberant symbol of sports joy — has survived (mostly) inside the bubbles and fan-less stadiums. But the future is murky. Medical experts have raged against the handshake for almost 100 years. And for the last decade or so, experts have presented the fist bump as a more sanitary option. (Spoiler: It probably isn’t.)

As the first wave of the pandemic spread across the world this spring, there was in kind a wave of stories about the future of handshakes and the high five. How would we punctuate business deals? How would we celebrate home runs? Many of these stories offered a few sentences about the fist bump — the usual quick rehash of its origins and cultural significance — and most mentioned one name: Fred Carter.

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The thing was, the details were scant. Most noted that Carter was an NBA guard who popularized the pound in the early ’70s. Some noted that baseball legend Stan Musial was believed to be an early fist bumper. Others mentioned boxers tapping gloves or Black soldiers showing solidarity during the Vietnam era. That was it. It wasn’t just the stories from this spring, either. To pull on the story’s threads and follow it into the past was to come across the same basic tale, repeated as fact time and again.

But was it true?

Why wasn’t the story of Fred Carter as widely known as the popular origin story of the high five, when Glenn Burke, an outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, reached his right arm backward into the sky and met the right hand of Dusty Baker at Dodger Stadium in October 1977? If the first fist bumps in sports pre-dated the first high fives, why had that gesture been ignored in the same era?

So one day this fall, the investigation began. I asked Fred Carter.

“No one,” he said, “has really talked to me and asked me about it.”

Part II: The history

Let’s start here, in the spring of 1971, just a year after Fred Carter brought the pound to the Bullets’ locker room, when a foreign correspondent for the United Press International news service filed a story from Camp Holloway, a U.S. Army base in Vietnam. The story focused on the racial tensions and racism faced by Black soldiers at Holloway. It also mentioned a trendy handshake.

Amidst examples of uneasy relations and declining morale among troops, it mentioned the cultural importance of “dap,” the intricate handshakes that had grown as an extension of the Black Power movement in the late ’60s. For the Black soldiers at Holloway, drafted into combat and sent to Vietnam, targets of racism in their own units, the dap was an esoteric act done out in the open, an elaborate series of handclasps, fist taps and chest bumps, a show of respect and solidarity among soldiers. The Vietnam War was the first in which American troops were integrated, fighting side by side, though most camps still featured de facto segregation and deep-rooted prejudices. At one point in the late ’60s, according to the New York Times, Black soldiers comprised 23 percent of combat troops despite making up 11 percent of the U.S. population. The dap became a symbol of survival.

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“The brothers looking out for each other,” said Vida Blue, the former A’s pitcher who served in an Army Reserve unit in Oakland during the Vietnam era.

The etymology of dap is unclear. It sounded like the Vietnamese word Đẹp, which translates to beautiful. In time, it became a shorthand for “dignity and pride.” (This might have been a “backronym,” an acronym created after the fact.) Beyond the name, the act of elaborate greetings — and ritualistic tapping or snapping — likely dates back even further, to cultures in West Africa, according to Tyler D. Parry, an assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Yet whatever the origins, the dap itself appeared to cross over in 1971.

That summer, Blue, the young A’s ace, was crafting the best season of his life, winning the AL MVP and Cy Young Award and gracing the cover of Time magazine. In the midst of the dominance, the A’s visited the White House and President Richard Nixon in August during a road trip to Washington. Blue dapped up Nixon and handed him a hat.

“They called it a soul handshake at that time,” Blue told me.

The taxonomy of dap could shift, depending on your company or base. There was no one handshake or style. There were versions, the kind of intricately choreographed routine that you now see during NBA introductions or after a home run. The basic definitions would survive past Vietnam. The handclasps, snaps and fist taps — whether vertical or horizontal — would infiltrate popular culture, from the playground basketball courts in Brooklyn to recording studios in Los Angeles to NBA locker rooms in Baltimore.

Carter, who grew up in Philadelphia, told me he didn’t recall being familiar with the term dap when he started bumping fists with his Bullets’ teammates. But technically, Carter’s fist bumps weren’t even daps. They were pounds. According to Geneva Smitherman, a professor emerita of English at Michigan State University and a pioneer in Black Studies, the dap evolved to include the knuckles touching in a vertical position. The pound, meanwhile, meant horizontal.

“The fist bump was in its evolutionary period,” Carter said.

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In that sense, Carter may have well been the Big Bang. In Baltimore, he was a happy warrior in the backcourt, exuberant in style, scrappy on defense, offering fist bumps to Earl the Pearl and the bruising Unseld, helping the Bullets to the NBA Finals in 1971. Gene Shue, the Bullets’ former coach, would say that Carter’s best skill was his enthusiasm. Before games, Unseld would pull his teammate aside: “Doggy, you got to get us going.” 

Carter often obliged.

“He was going all the time,” Kevin Loughery, a teammate on the Bullets, told me.

In the fall of 1971, a few months after the NBA Finals, Carter was traded to Philadelphia. He would bring the pound to a roster that would ultimately include Julius Erving, Doug Collins, Darryl Dawkins, World B. Free, Joe Bryant and George McGinnis. The cast of characters was colorful and influential, reaching the NBA Finals in 1977. Four years later, Sports Illustrated was doing an in-depth story on the trendy high five, which was having a moment. The Sixers of the ‘70s, McGinnis said, “were partial to pounding their fists.”

Carter doesn’t believe he invented the pound. Boxers have always touched gloves in the ring before matches. The dap had roots in the music cultures that pre-dated the Vietnam era. In April 1969, a New York Post photographer captured Yankees outfielder Roy White offering a fist — perhaps a dap of sorts — to Bobby Murcer after a home run at Yankee Stadium. And then, there is the case of Cardinals legend Stan Musial, a serial fist bumper later in life — and perhaps an early adopter as well.

As a retired Hall of Famer, Musial loved to hand out pounds at autograph signing and dinners. Once, Musial ran into then-Dodgers manager Joe Torre at a ballpark in the late 2000s and offered his fist. “When Stan Musial did that to me,” Torre said, “I knew it was the modern-day handshake.” Bernie Miklasz, a former columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who also contributed to The Athletic, said that Musial once told him that he started fist bumping during his career as a way to avoid germs from teammates. “Stan never claimed he invented the fist bump,” Miklasz wrote in an email. “But he wouldn’t do that, anyway.” The contemporary evidence from his playing days, however, is less authoritative. George Vecsey, a former New York Times columnist who wrote a biography of Musial, said he never came across that detail while doing research for his book. Gerry Musial Ashley, one of Musial’s children, told me she didn’t believe her father started fist-bumping “until way after his career,” though she noted she wasn’t around the clubhouse much during his playing days. “If he did do the fist bump earlier,” she said in an email, “I was not aware of it.”

As Carter and the Sixers delivered pounds in the ‘70s, the greeting remained a niche act, co-opted by nascent hip-hop scenes on the East Coast. The NBA was not a global phenomenon. Cable television had not arrived. As Carter puts it, one could offer a fist to a teammate in relative obscurity. It certainly didn’t have the exuberance of a high five or a forearm smash.

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“I would be lying if I said I thought it out,” Carter said. “Not at all. It was something that was just instinctive.”

By the late 1980s, the fist bump was still enough of a novelty that when the Georgetown basketball program started doing it, led by All-America star Reggie Williams, it warranted a mention in a college basketball notes column in the Record newspaper in New Jersey. The players, the story said, “make fists and bump knuckles,” describing it as a new variation on the high five. “It’s a sign of togetherness, we’re a team, a family,” Georgetown guard Dwayne Bryant said.

At that point, of course, Carter had been doing it for nearly two decades.

“Well, you know what happens with things,” Carter said. “Remember when the high five started? Somebody was doing it. Then other teams saw players doing it, and they started doing it. Where did it originate? It had to originate somewhere.”

When it comes to the high five, that’s a whole other question.

Part III: The high five

In one telling, Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker invented the high five at Dodger Stadium on Oct. 2, 1977, the final day of the regular season. Baker, now the manager of the Astros, clubbed his 30th homer and trotted around the bases. The Dodgers were headed to the postseason. The stadium rocked. Burke greeted Baker near the dugout by arching his hand backward and thrusting it in the air at an impossible angle. Baker reached up and slapped it.

That’s one telling. In another, the Louisville basketball team innovated the high five during the 1978-79 season, changing up the low five for something more adventurous. The Cardinals were the so-called Doctors of Dunk, one of the first modern programs to embrace the slam dunk after it was legalized. It certainly aided the brand. Louisville would win the NCAA title the next season, helping spread the maneuver to a national audience. During an Elite Eight win against LSU, analyst Billy Packer turned to announcer Dick Enberg: “You see the handshaking above the head, you know what the guys call that? A high five.”

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In yet another story, Magic Johnson said he invented the high five during his days at Michigan State, claiming he had the films to prove it. “Other people picked up on it,” he told Sports Illustrated. “If anybody tells you they started it, they’re wrong.”

It should be noted that back in 1981, as the high five spread across sports, this set off some trash talk. Derek Smith, one of the innovators, along with Louisville teammate Wiley Brown, told a local reporter at the Louisville Courier-Journal that Johnson was full of it.

“He didn’t do the high five,” Smith said. “Come by the basketball office sometime, and I’ll show you a tape of one of his games at Michigan State. He did this thing where he took his hand, put it on his forehead, and rubbed it across his hair before he slapped.”

No matter the credit — and the writers of history have seemed to settle on Burke and Baker — the ’80s ushered in the era of the high five, from the 1981 World Series to the Showtime Lakers to the beach volleyball scene in “Top Gun.”

“Once basketball came to life — and it came to life in the ’80s with Magic and Bird — there was a visual record,” Carter said. “Everything became the first.”

It’s likely, of course, that nobody “invented” the high five, not Burke or Louisville or Magic. Clarence “Big House” Gaines, the legendary basketball coach at Winston-Salem State, once theorized that the “slap five,” a term for the precursor to the high five, originated among Black musicians in the jazz and blues tradition. Ralph Boston, a former Olympic gold medalist in the long jump, told Sports Illustrated in the ’80s that high fives, or something close, were prevalent among sprinters in the early ’60s. “I first remember doing it with guys like Bob Hayes and Willie Davenport,” Boston said. “A guy would do something good and the others would want to congratulate him. He’d hold up his hand and the others would slap it. It was a way of saying, ‘Good job, well done.’ ”

As Carter told me, sometimes it’s not possible to explain why your body does something in the heat of competition. It’s just emotion, manifested in a movement, a reflect, a dance or a fist. Where does it come from? It comes from deep down. 

“It’s just like a rumor,” Baker said. “You’ll never find the originator of the high five, just as you’ll never find out who started the Shing-a-ling. But Glenn gets the credit for that one. He was from the Bay Area, and everything starts there before it gets to the rest of the world.” 

Part IV: The future 

As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, made the rounds this spring, delivering guidance for the pandemic, he offered an ominous warning about the future of the handshake. “As a society, just forget about shaking hands,” he said.

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In the context of the pandemic, the advice felt novel. It really wasn’t. Health officials, in some fashion, have recommended avoiding the handshake for close to a century, citing the ease with which germs and bacteria could transfer from skin-to-skin contact. In the 1920s, a New York City health commissioner said it was the sweatiest people who shook hands the most often. In the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, local health officials went so far as recommending dropping the handshake for the bow, a common Japanese custom.

The handshake was once a sign of peace, a custom designed to show others that you had no weapon. In time, it became a potent manner of spreading disease, as people often make contact with others via handshake and then touch their faces.

The handshake has proved resilient, though, and so have its descendants. So in the 2000s, experts took a different tack. If Americans insisted on physical contact, they should consider the humble fist bump. A study published in the American Journal of Infectious Control in 2014 found that fist bumps transferred less bacteria than handshakes. A headline in The Atlantic summed up the media cycle: “Science Proves Fist Bumps Are Better Than High Fives.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to offer another avenue for the pound to overtake the ‘shake. The only problem: The previous narrative was not necessarily true, said Mark Cameron, associate professor and infectious disease researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A study conducted by researchers at Case Western and published this summer found that any sort of contact greeting remains an effective way to transfer bacteria. The fist bump might be marginally safer, but not enough to warrant official guidance. And in the age of COVID, it’s not just the contact that is troublesome. It’s the proximity. 

“It’s being close enough to someone to reach out and touch them,” Cameron said. “So that gives the virus an opportunity to transmit from person to person in the air.”

Cameron is a longtime hockey fan. The sports world, he says, has more opportunities for physical, hand-to-hand greetings than just about any corner of American life. There are celebrations, handshake lines, pregame introductions, the list goes on. Just think of baseball, where every player who returns to the dugout is greeted by a line of high fives and pounds. In the new world of sports, those greetings have been minimized and policed under league-wide protocols. But they haven’t gone away. Cameron suspects that after COVID they never will. 

“Human beings are social animals,” he said. “So the future of the formal handshake at the end of a business deal, the future of high fives, fist bumps … it will come back when COVID is dealt with and when everybody feels back they can go back to whatever new normal might be. They have to. It’s part of the human condition.”

Part V: The meaning

One day in 2008, Fred Carter was watching television and a familiar image caught his eye. Barack Obama, then a United States senator from Illinois and the Democratic nominee for president, was on stage at a rally, offering a pound to his wife, Michelle. “It put a smile on my face,” he said. 

The Obamas’ fist bump spurred interest in the origins of the greeting and, for a moment, pushed it to the center of the political discussion. Carter remembers thinking that the pound was truly mainstream. Of course, by 2008, the fist bump already dominated the sports world in ways that seemed obvious — to the point that one could overlook its ubiquity. Tiger Woods spent the late ’90s and early 2000s fist-bumping his caddie. The Yankees built a dynasty under Torre while embracing the fist bump in the handshake line and in the dugout. (Former Yankees pitcher David Cone told me he didn’t remember the fist bump being around in the late ’80s when he pitched for the Mets, but it was popular with players like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera in the ’90s. “It just felt more streamlined and easier to do in a victory line,” he said.) Baseball, in fact, was a surprisingly fertile ground for the pound, with players constantly returning to the dugout and receiving congratulations. In 1998, Mark McGwire embraced a two-handed fist bump celebration while hitting 70 homers. Musial, of course, was still around to witness it.

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At that point, to try and remember when you first saw someone fist bump was like trying to remember when you first heard someone use a particular slang term. In fact, a simple origin story of the fist bump erases the more comprehensive and complicated history. It existed as a simple greeting for decades before Obama pulled it out on the campaign trail. It grew in basketball locker rooms, playground courts and barbershops. Smitherman, the English professor at Michigan State, even scoffed at the bland terminology. To call a pound a fist bump robbed it of its cultural meaning.  

Carter grew up playing basketball on the courts of Philadelphia, an East Coast basketball Mecca that nurtured the sport. “There was a certain toughness that we all had,” he said. “It was a toughness, and of course, there was some pizazz to it.”

The pound was borne of that ethos. 

Carter did not invent the idea of making a fist and bumping knuckles with a teammate or friend. But he was a Johnny Appleseed of sorts, one of thousands, slowly spreading something that seemed so subtle and simple. This is the way language works.

I asked Carter if he could remember who inspired him to bump fists. He said he honestly could not remember. I asked if he could remember when he was first associated with it. How did he get identified as an early adopter? He wasn’t sure about that, either. It just happened. Sort of like the fist.

“There’s a phrase in the Bible that says all truths will come to light,” he said. “Everything surfaces. It just came to light.”

(Illustration: Madison Ketcham)

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