Hank Williams Jr. will return to ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” to open the broadcast with the theme song “Are you Ready for Some Football?” six years after being let go for comparing President Obama to Hitler, a network spokesperson told TheWrap.
“I think it’s a return to our past in that it’s such an iconic song associated with football,” ESPN senior vice president Stephanie Druley told The Tennessean.
Back in 2011, Williams Jr. appeared on the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends” and made the worst kind of headlines when he commented on John Boehner playing golf with Barack Obama.
“That would be like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu,” he said at the time, which resulted in ESPN parting ways with the country rocker.
“While Hank Williams, Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to Monday Night Football. We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight’s telecast,” ESPN said in statement in 2011. Williams Jr. claimed he was “misunderstood” in his own statement.
Williams Jr. is back and the new version of the iconic theme song will debut on Sept. 11 when the New Orleans Saints take on the Minnesota Vikings.
“It was the original,” Druley said. “It belongs to Monday Night Football. It really is about returning to what fans know. It’s a Monday night party and that’s what we’re all hoping to get back to.”