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Sweet Caroline

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16 Dec 2008

This past summer I was at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and I got to attend a Red Sox game with Erik Britt-Webb, courtesy of Amazon Web Services. As a baseball fanatic, my first visit to Fenway was a huge treat, and even though I didn’t care a bit who won (the Red Sox did), I thoroughly enjoyed being a Sox fan for a day.

The Red Sox have used Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline as an anthem since 1998 and have used it during the middle of the 8th inning as a sing along since 2002. I sung along with the entire stadium that night. As Wikipedia says, "the song has become an iconic part of Red Sox lore, even having been featured in the movie Fever Pitch."

Last year Diamond revealed that the song is about Caroline Kennedy.

The inspiration for the song came from a photograph of the then nine-year-old Kennedy the singer saw in a magazine while staying at a hotel in Memphis.

"It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony," Diamond said. "It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there."

Caroline Kennedy is now angling to be named as a senator, taking Hillary Clinton’s New York seat if Clinton becomes Secretary of State. Given the Boston fan’s hatred of all things New York, I wonder if they’ll still play the song?

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