Mr. Matheny had reached iconic status by the time I was sitting in his honors sophomore English class. He had exposed a generation of east side Catholics to the joys of The Canterbury Tales and the terrors of reading essays in front of the class. But over his 30-year teaching career, the admiration he received had become automatic. It no longer mattered what or how he actually taught. Every parent wanted their child in his class. Every administrator turned a blind eye to his slipping abilities. We read our essays aloud so he could burn instructional time and shout out our grade at that moment instead of having to read them himself. We were forced to memorize the preface to Les Miserables, a page-long sentence for which I’ve yet to find a use. And he felt that a valuable use of class time involved digging through his record collection, which sat on the shelf below our unused textbooks, exposing us to Tom Jones and Neil Diamond.

Mr. Matheny could never choose which troubadour he preferred. Tom Jones had the swagger in his voice that Matheny would use when he encouraged us to read our essays again…because he had fallen asleep. But Neil Diamond was a bit more of a renaissance man. While Tom Jones seemed to spend most of his time on a Vegas stage dodging panties, Diamond was singing duets with Streisand at the Grammys and starring in “The Jazz Singer.”

Ten years after being in his class and nine years after his death, I began thinking about his split loyalty and set out to determine which singer is better. I chose to use the 2008 definition of “better” which is to say “most popular.” Obviously, my no-depth investigation incorporated internet searches….and….eh, just internet searches. Let’s not get crazy. But I focused on two categories: the artists’ body of work and their fan base.

Music

Both men have had surprisingly symmetrical careers. I always assumed that Tom Jones had a significant head start, but that’s probably because British accents make everyone seem seven years older than they actually are. Jones was born in 1940 and put out his first album in 1965, while Diamond arrived a year later in 1941 and released The Feel of Neil Diamond in 1966. According to Wikipedia—again, this is 2008 shaky-research we’re conducting—Jones edges Diamond in studio albums (28 to 25). But when it comes to compilation albums, which are the record company’s way of saying “If we put all your albums in a CD player, hit shuffle, and burn that, your dumb-ass fans will buy it,” Diamond buries Jones 22 - 3. Neil has made more albums, but not more music.

Movies

Both singers have also dabbled in acting, so I tapped into the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), also known as “that site you go to every time you have a bet with your friend about the name of the actress who played Marty McFly’s girlfriend in Back to the Future before Elizabeth Shue took over the role” (it was Claudia Wells—I won $10 on that one). There I found that Tom Jones has not only been featured on more soundtracks (76-45) and been credited as “self” on television shows and film more often (126-54), but he actually has more acting credits than Diamond, who hasn’t done much beyond The Jazz Singer and Saving Silverman. Jones has inhabited the roles of seven characters, from Dick Turpin on a 1978 episode of Fantasy Island to “Photographer” in 1994’s “Silk n’ Sabatoge.” So it appears that while Jones is willing to whore himself out in cameo appearances and made-for-tv movies, Diamond will whore himself out via recycled compilation albums. Diamond edges Jones on grounds of knowing his strength.

Fan Base

My initial search for the artists’ fan base started at their official webpages. TomJones.com features all the bells and whistles of a state-of-the-art musician site. Tour dates, interview transcripts, ringtones, t-shirts and 30-second clips of songs decorate the page. This all points to a worldwide fan base that requires a central location to feed their Tom Jones’ jones.

I couldn’t find Neil Diamond’s webpage, and it’s never a sign of credibility when an artist’s Wikipedia entry is the first result of a Google search. When I typed in NeilDiamond.com, I was navigated to a Sony Music site for his album 12 Songs, but that remained untouched since the album’s 2005 release. I was forced to rely on fansites like Diamondville.com and “The First Official Neil Diamond Homepage since 1995.” These websites blinked with airbrushed pictures of Neil and Miscrosoft WordArt page titles whizzing around the screen, which is more of a recipe for an epileptic seizure than reputable web information.

I feared that Diamond had no fan base beyond the rudimentary websites until I headed to MySpace. There, Diamond enjoyed over 46,000 friends and nearly one million page views. Who needs an official webpage when Myspace’s Tom can do it for you? Tom Jones had a mere 295 friends and 129,000 page views. I felt sorry for him, so I requested to be his friend. Of course, in the spirit of objectivity, I made the same request to Neil. Facebook also proved Neil’s ability to ride the social networking wave, having 195 groups created for him, as compared to Tom Jones’ 125. The other basic web searches provided more mixed bag results:

It’s clear that Neil Diamond is more handsome, as shown by the image search results, but can’t dance as well as Tom Jones, as shown by the YouTube video results. They have similar news story appeal, but Jones seems to win this battle with the general web search results (it must be noted that the name Tom Jones is not extraordinary, so the search results may have been skewed by Tommy Lee Jones interviews and Tom & Jerry cartoons).

Conclusion

It’s a wash. If I was forced to choose, I’d go with Diamond because he didn’t change his name (that’s right—Tom Jones is the pseudonym). I can’t make any definitive statements as to who has won this battle of balladeers. And neither could Mr. Matheny—then again, he never tried. I insisted to myself that despite his increasing senility, Matheny was somehow taking class time to listen to these records, challenging us to find the importance, the relevance, the necessity of “Sex Bomb.” I was wrong. He simply knew that during the average American life, having to quote “Sweet Caroline” would be more socially important, relevant and necessary than anything Lord Byron could come up with.