Teammates Join Him on the Road to Nowhere

The season before Lew Alcindor arrived at UCLA in the fall of 1965, the Bruins’ freshman team was sometimes caught going in the wrong direction.

Former All-American Mike Warren, who was on the Bruins’ 1964-65 freshman team, talked about one of those times during a UCLA basketball reunion over the weekend.

He recalled that the team had lost three or four games in a row going into a game at the old Pepperdine campus in Los Angeles. He said coach John Kalin gave such an impassioned talk before the game that center Neville Saner volunteered to lead the team out of the locker room.

“We were all fired up,” Warren said, “and followed Saner out a door -- and right into a street.”

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Trivia time: Warren, now an actor probably best known for his role as officer Bobby Hill on the old NBC show “Hill Street Blues,” came to UCLA from what high school?

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His mind is still quick: Bobby Pounds, who played on UCLA’s 1950-51 and 1951-52 teams, came from Fresno, had played two years of junior college ball in Visalia and hadn’t been anywhere outside the San Joaquin Valley. At the reunion he said that thanks to the Bruins, he was able to visit such places as New York; Lexington, Ky.; Iowa; and Peoria, Ill.

“And did I mention Iowa?” he said.

When someone in the audience said he had, Pounds shot back, “Well, we played them twice.”

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Honest fish story: Former New York Giants linebacker Harry Carson, who was among those inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame over the weekend, was presented by his son Donald.

Donald Carson, who recently received a degree in biology from Savannah (Ga.) State, said he had thought about a lot of things he could talk about, such as the fishing trips in which he and his brother would join his dad.

“I could talk about all the fish we caught,” he said, “but that would be a lie. We never caught anything. We mainly sat there in the boat and caught sunburn.”

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Another fish story: Donald Carson, who is battling a rare blood disorder, said his father took him from Savannah to Maryland about a month ago for treatment that was supposed to take only one day. But doctors said they needed an extra day.

“My dad asked if there was anything I needed from home, and I said no,” he said. “But I let it slip that my roommate was out of town and said aloud, ‘Man, my fish are going to die.’

“To show you what kind of man my father is, he drove from Maryland to Savannah, Ga., just to feed my fish. And they really didn’t mean that much. They were like $2 fish from Wal-Mart.”

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Looking back: On this day in 1984, Carl Lewis set an Olympic record of 19.80 seconds in the 200 meters at the Los Angeles Summer Games.

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Trivia answer: Central High in South Bend, Ind., where John Wooden coached from 1934-43.

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And finally: Channel 7’s Curt Sandoval, on Floyd Landis’ second blood sample confirming irregular levels of testosterone: “A sample plus B sample equals see you in court.”

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Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.