Pros, Amateurs in Scramble Today : LPGA Event Begins Thursday at Oakmont Country Club

The $250,000 GNA tournament, eighth event of the $9-million Ladies PGA tour, will begin today at Oakmont Country Club in Glendale with a celebrity scrambles pro-am featuring 40 LPGA players and 160 amateurs.

In a scrambles format, each player in the group hits from the spot of the best preceding shot. There are no individual scores.

Play in the 72-hole championship will start Thursday on the 6,328 yard, par-72 course--one of the six longest the LPGA plays--with 143 professionals and one amateur, Pearl Sin of Bellflower, in the starting field. First tee time is 7:30 a.m.

No player has won more than once on this year’s LPGA tour, and all seven tournament winners--Hollis Stacy, JoAnne Carner, Patty Sheehan, Amy Alcott, Betsy King, Bonnie Lauer and Jane Blalock--will be at Oakmont.

King was Player of the Year and the leading money-winner last year. Stacy is the U.S. Women’s Open champion, and Sheehan won the LPGA championship. Carner is in the LPGA Hall of Fame and was Player of the Year in 1981, 1982 and 1983.

Pat Bradley, who was second five times last year and again last Sunday in Hawaii when she double-bogeyed the last hole, allowing Blalock to slip through and win, will be trying for her first win since the final tournament of 1983. Before Bradley missed the cut in the Uniden Invitational two weeks ago at Mesa Verde, she had not failed to play the final rounds in 121 tournaments dating back to 1980.

The GNA field will be cut to the low 70 and ties after Friday’s second round.

Seventeen of the first 18 money-winners from last year are at Oakmont. Only Kathy Whitworth among the game’s leading names is taking the week off. Other contenders looking for their first 1985 victories include Nancy Lopez, Ayako Okamoto, Juli Inkster, Jan Stephenson and Spain’s Marta Figueras-Dotti, last year’s Rookie of the Year and a 1982 graduate of USC.

Scattered among the 40 fivesomes today will be actors Jamie Farr, Donald O’Connor, John Agar and Buddy Rogers; game-show host Dennis James, jockey Chris McCarron, football coaches Chuck Knox of the Seattle Seahawks and John Mackovic of the Kansas City Chiefs, Bill Bain of the Rams, Bill Sharman of the Lakers and Craig Fertig of USC.

This will be the first LPGA tournament played at Oakmont, although PGA events were held there in 1935, won by MacDonald Smith, and 1948, won by Ben Hogan. This will also be the first tournament sponsored by the Great Northern Insured Annuity Corp. of Seattle.

Beneficiaries of the charity tournament are the California Hospital Medical Center, Glendale YMCA, Glendale Symphony Orchestra Assn. Women’s Committee and the Assistance League of Glendale.