This column is not going to endear me to my rowdy friends.

I'll take the heat, however, and just say a country editor can survive and that I'm glad I don't have to endure that insipid opening song to Monday Night Football by Hank Williams Jr. anymore.

While you speak of it being a matter of family tradition, the Monday Night Football and not the opening song is the family tradition.

People talk about Hank's right to free speech being violated. No, it wasn't violated. He said what he said so he had his free speech, as dimwitted a comment as it was. Just because we have the right to free speech doesn't mean it comes with no cost. That's why we have libel and slander laws in place.

I'm no Obama supporter as many of you know but drawing comparisons to Hitler, even in the most lighthearted way, are out of place. Obama may be ineffective as a president, but I have seen no evidence of crematories or human experiments going on at the White House.

I'm just crying because I care, not for Hank Jr., whose own son, Hank III, said the comments were out of line, but for football. It would be like me, looking at a picture from life's other side, comparing your mother or father to Hitler or your cousin to Slobodan Milosevic for a more contemporary miscreant.

I listened to the original opening for Monday Night Football after all this pointless furor and found it to be free of lyrics, yet it had a nice disco beat to it, paying homage to no cult figure or one icon. For 23 years, however, people began associating MNF with Bocephus rather than the sport itself, one which many of you know by now is my passion.

Ripping the right to this song from under the rambling man was the right of ESPN and I must say it's a little ridiculous for Fox to be talking politics with Hank, Eddie Vedder or whoever. Entertainers should entertain us, not try to enlighten us or brainwash us with their political views. That Bono has his agenda matters not to me. That Bocephus doesn't like Obama isn't going to help sway me that I should dislike him any more.

What a heck of a mess it becomes when celebrities have to spout their political views when they should just shut up and do what they do best — entertain us.

Maybe that's the outlaw's reward for thinking your opinion more valuable than it really is. I don't know, but Monday will be the same to me with or without Hank and probably be a little more palatable since ESPN made Hank move it on over.

The comments Hank made were not as low as a man could go, in fact there have been worse, but in the end at least he didn't talk about what would have happened if the South had won, that would bring up a whole new set of problems and it seems Bocephus forgot his own rules that he set in song, that you have to be careful of the stones you throw.

Personally, it was refreshing to see an NFL icon like Barry Sanders deliver an albeit scripted but stirring tribute to a team who has a nation of football fans, including me, wanting tickets for the bandwagon.

“Right now for the Lions, life is good. But like this town, they won't rest. They'll work, they'll sweat, they'll fight,” Sanders said. "Detroit doesn't pat itself on the back, it gets the job done. Especially tonight, on Monday Night Football."

So, Hank, go ahead and keep your change and, yes, to answer your question, I am always ready for some football and maybe a little more now that I don't have to hear that song every week — Lance Martin