How Sweet Caroline Became a Stadium Anthem from Boston to Wembley

Sweet Caroline was released in 1969, and since then it has lived through two quite different lives, each lasting roughly thirty years. Until the end of the 1990s, it looked like the song would end up in the dusty corners of oldies compilations for AM radio — a likeable but somewhat tame artifact from the same summer as Woodstock. Then two things happened at once. Critics began to reassess Neil Diamond, as the generation of reviewers who had dismissed his work as kitsch gradually moved on, and younger writers started defending him. And, in a turn nobody expected, Sweet Caroline became a "jock jam." Far Out Magazine ↗

Jock jam was a short-lived name for the loud, raw music that fired up crowds at American stadiums and arenas in the 1990s — things like Whoomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team, Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic, or Unbelievable by EMF. Tommy Boy Records teamed up with the sports network ESPN and, starting in 1995, released a series of jock jam compilations. Neil Diamond never made it onto any of those records, yet he still wedged himself in among their tracks as a fixture of stadium playlists. Far Out Magazine ↗

The first piece of the puzzle was likely American high school and college marching bands, which since the 1960s had been reworking old melodic hits into brass arrangements and playing them during breaks in basketball and football games. That's probably where large crowds first sang the "bah bah bah" outside of an actual concert. Once the song was already associated with sports at the amateur level, it was only a matter of time before professionals picked it up: the Carolina Panthers, then a new NFL franchise, reportedly added it to their stadium playlist as early as 1996 — apparently just for the resemblance between the words Caroline and Carolina. Far Out Magazine ↗

The best-documented branch, however, is the Boston one, and it begins by accident. The song was first played at Fenway Park in 1997 by Amy Tobey, a staff member in charge of the music — and only because a friend of hers had just given birth to a daughter named Caroline. Tobey then played it superstitiously: only between the seventh and ninth innings, and only when the Red Sox were leading. It became a fixed custom only in 2002, when Charles Steinberg joined the club's management. He ordered it played at every game during the middle of the eighth inning regardless of the score, because in his view cheerful music belongs to the moment when the home team goes up to bat. Boston.com ↗

The Boston crowd also added its own lyrics, the now-ubiquitous "so good, so good, so good." Nobody knows for certain where it came from, but one theory traces it back to the fall of 1986, when local singer Pat Benti performed with the cover band Sha-Boom at Boston's Halloween Monster Dash run. "It was basically a medley that started with I'm A Believer," Benti recalled. "At the Monster Dash, in front of about fifteen thousand people in costumes, I announced the songwriter Neil Diamond and launched into Sweet Caroline. And then I started improvising and threw in the 'so good, so good, so good'." His bandmate Tony Baglio confirmed this in 2025. Far Out Magazine ↗

The "so good" version became the anthem of the Boston Red Sox at precisely the time the team transformed from perennial losers into multiple World Series champions. It cemented itself in the city's memory for good in 2013, when, after the Boston Marathon bombing, people embraced the song as a symbol of solidarity; single sales spiked, and Neil Diamond himself came to Fenway to sing it in person. Far Out Magazine ↗

It reached Europe by its own route, and in the British Isles there is still a dispute over who it truly belongs to. Northern Irish fans have been singing it since 2005, when their team beat England. The English only made it their own at the 2020 European Championship: after the win over Germany, Wembley DJ Tony Perry played Sweet Caroline instead of the traditional Vindaloo, and the song accompanied the English team for the rest of the tournament, all the way to the final. On club terraces, among Aston Villa and Chelsea fans, it had already been heard long before that. The Northern Irish took the borrowing badly — presenter Eamonn Holmes told the English at the time to go find their own song. Goal ↗

It's a textbook example of a song rewritten by its own audience. Diamond never wrote "so good" into the score — Boston added it on its own — and it's in that very form that the whole world knows it today, from baseball stadiums to football terraces to hockey arenas.

On SuperMusic.cz you can find the lyrics to Sweet Caroline, in case anyone wants to practice that "so good" before the crowd sweeps them up in the stands.



Illustrative photo: Neil Diamond sings Sweet Caroline during the middle of the eighth inning at the MLB All-Star Game on July 16, 2013. Photo: slgckgc / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0