No high fives there. Checking Wiki for fist bump and high fives finds nothing about either before the 1970s except for the Musial reference. Time has a reference to high and low fives orignating in the 1950s but I don’t know where they got that from.
This is totally apocryphal; I heard it from a former minor league baseball player. He said that the origin of the fist bump was in reaction to a major league baseball player who regularly urinated on his hands (not Moises Alou since fist bumping pre-dates him). No one wanted to shake hands with him, and so other players fist bumped instead of shaking hands.
I spent some time this morning looking at YouTube clips of Musial. In every instance except one he shakes hands with everyone. Sometimes he even uses both hands.
In one clip Musial is in the dugout (receiving congratulations) and he appears to be what used to be called “slipping skin” – two people sliding open palms past each other. (For some reason that’s a move I associate with jazz musicians.) Either way, no fist bump.
Granted a few YouTube clips isn’t much of a history to go by, but that’s all I can find.
kunilou, nice find. Nothing like pouring some real history on urban legends.
There remains a possibility that Musial picked up the habit after his playing years. The baseball legends circuit didn’t get really big until the 1970s so - if there is any truth to it - he may have copied the movement from watching others who were already doing by that time. Either way, Musial is an unlikely originator.
Ngrams and Google Books don’t give any good hits through the end of the century. (The earlier ones are of the “he made his fist bump against the desk” or “fist; bump” false hit variety.)
The American Dialect Society Mailing List, of which I am a member, has done quite a bit on this back in 2008. But you have to serch for “dap” rather than “fist bump.”
To summarize, those cites posit an evolution through a variety of black (or jazz) handshakes, from slipping the skin to the complicated series of movements called dap (the ones that were parodied every time a black character appeared on a television show) to the fist bump.
The New York Times gives the best history in a November 25, 2001 article titled A Bump and No Shake. There are two more specific origins, one from basketball:
and a preposterous one from cartoons:
No mention of Musial or baseball there or anywhere that I see. Apparently the movement had a brief fling in the spotlight in the 1970s and then reappeared in the late 90s and lingered.
