Sport: Tribal Rite

Tribal Rite Playing a qualifying round on the rugged, wind-whipped links at Pebble Beach, Calif., a nervous young Nevada golf pro named Tony Lema tried too hard to recover from a bad lie, took a prodigious swing—and disappeared. He had fallen off an 18-ft. cliff. No one seemed surprised. This was the 16th annual performance of the West Coast tribal rite—complete with fairway high jinks and off-course bottle belting—known as the Bing Crosby National Pro-Amateur Golf Championship. Lema's leap was just the kind of accidental clowning that the crowd had come to see.

Round of Parties. The...