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Home » Sweet Caroline: Boxing’s ‘touching you’ song for an 11-year-old girl

Sweet Caroline: Boxing’s ‘touching you’ song for an 11-year-old girl

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Boxing’s adopted song that many fans delight in singing was written for an 11-year-old girl, readily available research into the origins shows.

Nial Diamond, a very talented songwriter who has never been charged with anything to do with pedophilia, aired his inspiration for the 1969 classic.

But as reported by New York Magazine in 2007 and CBS in 2012, the song is not ‘little girl appropriate’ no matter the innocence.

Airing how the song came about, Diamond revealed he wrote the lyrics. It was after looking at a picture of Caroline Kennedy, daughter of former US President John F. Kennedy.

But here’s the important bit. Kennedy was only eleven years old at the time, twelve, when the song got officially released.

Sweet Caroline is about an 11-year-old girl

If you look at the song’s words, which boxing fans regularly belt out at fight events, it’s more than a little questionable.

“I look at the night, and it don’t seem so lonely. We fill it up with only two, oh. And when I hurt. Hurting runs off my shoulder.

“How can I hurt when holding you? Warm, touchin’ warm, reaching out. Touching me, touching you.”

And then comes the title line, “Sweet Caroline,” after the pre-pubescent girl that Diamond says was ‘cute’ when he saw a photo of her in a magazine.

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

Diamond might have been a “young, broke songwriter” at the time, but he was a 27-year-old man writing those kinds of words about a girl so young.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, nobody even questioned it, even through the 1990s. Also, the song was revived in the UK in the 2000s and still gets played today.

Banned by Penn State

Penn State banned the song for those “touching me, touching you” about “Sweet Caroline.” – However, boxing seems to have no problem with it being belting it out at every opportunity.

However, Lou DiBella did suspend the song from being played at all at the Devin Haney vs George Kambosos Jr. fight simply because it annoyed many people.

CBS journalist Ryan Wooley mused about the song after inking an article about Penn State’s decision.

He said: “I mean, think about it. Is the song truly about a child molester? Does it make someone a child molester, or think of one by singing it? Of course not.

“So what good comes from banning the song from the stadium?

“Someone could argue that Neil Diamond wrote it about 11-year-old Caroline Kennedy, which is a bit creepy,” Wooley added.

Will that stop boxing fans from signing it from the rafters? – Probably not, but then again, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Saville’s BBC theme tunes also had a nice ring to them.

The views expressed in this article are the opinions of experienced boxing writer Phil Jay. Twitter @PhilJWBN.  

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