In Heartland, His Heart Was in Southland : UCLA: Even though his former teammates are still ranked No. 1, Arnold Ale is happy to be sitting out the season as a Bruin.

His former teammates overpowered Pittsburgh last Saturday to solidify their No. 1 ranking and run their winning streak to 20 games.

Meanwhile, his future teammates lost their third consecutive game, allowing the opposition to drive the length of the field to the winning touchdown for the second week in a row. Their 3-5 record represents their worst start in 10 years.

But Arnold Ale, who started four games for a national championship team as a freshman last season at Notre Dame, has no regrets about transferring in August to UCLA, where he is sitting out this season in accordance with NCAA transfer rules.

Born in San Pedro and raised in Carson, Ale didn’t really want to attend Notre Dame and felt out of place once he got there.

Before making recruiting trips to Nebraska, Notre Dame and Alabama as a senior at Carson High School, Ale had never been out of California, other than to visit his parents’ native Samoa as an infant.

And on the day that he signed with Notre Dame in February 1988, bowing to parental pressure and ignoring his own instincts, he had tears in his eyes as he broke the news of his last-minute decision to USC Coach Larry Smith.

“It was my husband’s decision,” said his mother, Faatulu.

Once in South Bend, though, Ale enjoyed playing for the Irish.

A 6-foot-3, 205-pound linebacker, he recovered a fumbled kickoff against Michigan and sealed a victory over Pitt by intercepting a pass. He started against Miami, Air Force, Rice and USC and played in all 12 games as Notre Dame swept to the national title.

Still, he felt alienated.

“I didn’t feel very comfortable out there,” he said, declining to elaborate, other than to say it was more than homesickness that prompted him to leave. “I felt like I didn’t belong.”

Last spring, he thought that he might want to transfer. “Sometimes he’d call and he’d be crying,” his mother said. Then, after spending last summer in Carson, Ale was convinced that he didn’t want to return to Notre Dame.

“I knew the day before he left, because he was so quiet and I could see his face was not happy,” his mother said. “So I asked him why he was acting like that. And when I asked him why he wasn’t happy, he started crying. I asked him why, and he said, ‘I don’t want to go back.’ ”

Still, Ale returned to Notre Dame for the start of practice. A week later, he told Coach Lou Holtz that he wanted out.

“He was upset and disappointed,” Ale said. “Some of the players were disappointed, too, but they understood where I was coming from.”

And where he was headed: Home.

“I just felt I had to get back to L.A.,” Ale said.

Why did he pick UCLA over USC, which had been his first choice coming out of high school?

It has been reported that Notre Dame, which plays the Trojans every year, would have made it difficult for him to transfer to USC, and Ale said last August that Holtz told him, perhaps jokingly, that he wouldn’t release him to go to USC.

Holtz said later that his comments to Ale were made in jest and that Notre Dame would never stand in the way of a player who wanted to transfer. If Notre Dame had refused to release him, Ale would have had to pay his own way in school for a year.

Whether Holtz was kidding or not, Ale seems convinced that he wound up in the right place.

“I should have come here all along,” he said this week, sitting on a bench outside Pauley Pavilion.

Ale is happy for his former teammates, but said: “UCLA is my team now.” It doesn’t bother him that the Irish are unbeaten again and possibly on their way to another national championship.

“Next year,” he said, “we plan on going unbeaten.”

Soft-spoken and rarely expansive with his thoughts, Ale said that a season without games--he practices with the Bruins daily--has given him a chance to add bulk and lift weights more frequently. He weighed 225 pounds the last time he checked.

“I set high goals,” he said. “I wanted to get bigger, stronger and faster.”

UCLA’s coaches believe he will make a major impact next season, when he is expected to move right into the starting lineup.

Already, his mother said, the sadness has left his face.

“He’s very happy,” she said. “And I am happy, too.”

Bruin Notes

Stacey Elliott, a reserve defensive tackle who was booked Tuesday on two counts of battery, has voluntarily left the team until the matter is resolved, the UCLA sports information office announced. Elliott, 21, allegedly grabbed the buttocks of two women in separate on-campus incidents last summer, police said. . . . Linebacker Marvcus Patton has made more tackles for losses this season--17--than all but two players in Coach Terry Donahue’s 14-season tenure. Carnell Lake made 19 in 1987, and Irv Eatman made 18 in 1980.