Television icon, Johnny Carson, concluded his Tonight Show monologues with a golf swing for 30 years. And following Carson’s death, co-host, Ed McMahon, revealed why the trademark move was actually “delicious irony.”
On the whole, Carson and McMahon shared a friendship that lasted 46 years until the host’s death in 2005. And in McMahon’s memoir, Here’s Johnny, he recalled meeting Homer and Ruth Carson in the early days of his companionship with Carson. That’s when he discovered his friend’s competitive, “take-no-prisoners gene” came “directly from his mother.”