Mlb The Show Player Vault
If yous're a baseball fan, you lot could be forgiven for never hearing of Glenn Burke until now. An outfielder for the L.A. Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics in the late '70s, Burke was mostly a backup, playing in a piffling over 200 games over the grade of four seasons. Purely equally a baseball actor, Burke was considered an impressive athlete who never quite put it all together to get truly groovy.
Withal, Burke is the rare professional athlete who lived a life that was virtually much more than his on-field operation in sports. For one thing, Burke was the first Major League Baseball (MLB) player e'er to exist out as gay with his teammates, managers and team executives. That'southward an incredibly brave claim to fame, and it makes him an important figure in the history of gay rights and the fight for equality more broadly.
And nevertheless, there's much more to Shush's life than even that. He was also probably the inventor of the "loftier five," if such a thing tin can be said to have an inventor. Of course, the slapping of hands in celebration or greeting was probably "invented" in lots of places at lots of times past lots of people. Just when Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker rose up for an impromptu, improvised high five after Baker crushed his 30th dwelling run of the season in October of 1977 at Dodger Stadium, it set the loftier 5 in stone forever.
Allow'southward accept a expect at what made Glenn Burke such a special and important figure in the history of sports and the fight for equality, and explore how the high five became an enduring role of that legacy.
The Outset Openly Gay Professional Baseball Player
In 2013, when the NBA's Jason Collins became the get-go man to be an active gay athlete in the four major American sports (baseball, football, basketball and hockey), information technology was a watershed moment. Collins himself admitted at the time, "I'm glad I'thousand coming out in 2013 rather than 2003. The climate has shifted; public opinion has shifted. And yet we still accept so much farther to go."
The shifting climate Collins was referring to didn't begin in 2003, either. Collins' announcement in 2013, in addition to being an important historical moment, besides helped bring to low-cal many of the stories of gay men in American sports who had been unable to be publically out over the course of the preceding decades.
Glenn Burke'southward story was one of these. Burke had been an incredible athlete as a youngster — equally a basketball player, he was the Northern California Basketball game Thespian of the Twelvemonth, leading his Berkeley High School squad to a perfect tape and a state championship in his senior twelvemonth. He was a great baseball actor also, though, which was more appealing given his height of v'10". The Dodgers drafted him in 1972, and he played in their minor league system until he got called up to the major league club in 1976.
One time he was with the Dodgers, he did not specifically effort to keep his sexuality a secret. He was out to the people closest to him, and spoke openly with teammates, executives and even sportswriters virtually it. That those sportswriters chose not to write about it is, perhaps, every bit good an example as any of how times changed betwixt the 1970s and Jason Collins' announcement in 2013.
While Burke'south teammates on the Dodgers adored him and were saddened by his loss in the clubhouse when the team traded him abroad in 1978, his human relationship with the team's management was more complicated. Burke claimed that general manager Al Campanis offered him a sizable bribe to participate in a sham marriage. According to at least one story, Burke replied, "I guess you hateful to a woman."
Burke also befriended Tommy Lasorda Jr., — a.k.a "Spunky" — the son of Dodgers' manager Tommy Lasorda. Spunky wasn't out either, but in Shush's 1995 memoir, Out at Home, he wrote that he and Spunky had talked at the time about Tom Sr.'due south homophobia. Spunky passed away from complications from AIDS in 1993, and his male parent never acknowledged his son's homosexuality. Shush believed that his association with Lasorda's son was office of why he was traded away from the Dodgers in 1978.
Burke had retired from MLB by 1980, and in 1982 he officially came out in an article for Inside Sports. He before long appeared on the Today Show with Bryant Gumble besides. He was mostly received with silence — quite a contrast to the huge amounts of attention received past men who've come up out in American sports in contempo years.
Before he left baseball, Burke had time to leave his mark — non for his batting boilerplate, domicile runs, or spectacular plays in the outfield, only for his celebrations. About accounts of Shush's career mention the fact that he was a honey member of the Dodgers. Part of that was being the first up to congratulate his teammates afterwards a big moment.
And that's what leads us to the famous story of the invention of the high five. On October two, the final 24-hour interval of the 1977 regular flavour (the Dodgers would proceed to lose in the World Series to the New York Yankees), the Dodgers weren't playing for much. They'd already guaranteed themselves a matchup with the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series.
In the sixth inning, downwardly 2-0, Dusty Baker came up to the plate. He blasted a domicile run out to center field for his 30th home run of the season. That made the Dodgers the offset team in baseball game history to have four players each with 30 — Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith. Shush, who was pinch striking and happened to be waiting on deck, met Bakery at the plate with his manus stretched high over his head. Years later, Bakery remembered: "[Burke's] hand was upward in the air, and he was arching way back.…So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed similar the affair to do."
Amazingly, immediately after this, Burke stepped up to the plate and hit a home run himself. It was the offset home run of his major league career, and one of merely two he hit earlier he retired. And then it was that the loftier v was cemented in baseball lore, and has been passed downwards through the generations to the present twenty-four hours.
Glenn Burke Afterwards Baseball game
A combination of injuries and prejudice towards his sexuality managed to lead to Shush'south determination to leave baseball game. While many of his teammates loved him, having to endure listening to slurs and battling preconceived notions near gay athletes was somewhen as well much. Leaving the Oakland Athletics, he started hanging around the Castro district of San Francisco. He put the experience this fashion: "I was making money playing brawl and non having any fun….At present I'm not making coin, but I'chiliad having fun."
In the early '80s, Burke participated in the first Gay Games in San Francisco, and was a star in a local gay softball league. But what he was really known for was the high five. According to ESPN, he "would regularly sit on the hood of a car — whichever ane happened to exist parked in front end of a gay bar called the Pendulum Club — flash his magnetic grinning and high-five everyone who walked by." The writer Michael J. Smith, who wrote the piece in 1982 in which Shush publicly came out, called the high five, "a defiant symbol of gay pride."
Unfortunately, in spite of all this, Burke'south life after baseball was hard. In 1987 he broke his leg when a motorcar striking him crossing the street. He was often fond to drugs and couldn't keep a steady task. In 1993 he was diagnosed with HIV; he passed abroad just two years later on. The high five is the piece of Shush that manages to alive on, and captures something of the joy that characterized the good times of his life. His sister, Lutha Davis, said afterwards his expiry, "At present when something neat happens in life, people practise the high-five." Information technology's difficult to imagine leaving a more enduring legacy than that.
Source: https://www.ask.com/lifestyle/glenn-burke-and-the-high-five?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740004%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex&ueid=6a0c9efa-fc70-4980-8bf0-8ec2b4118bde
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