UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK / ROBYN NORWOOD : Anteaters Surprised to Find Teammate in Hall of Fame

The UC Irvine men’s basketball team’s tour of historical sites during its trip to play Boston University didn’t include Faneuil Hall, the Old North Church or Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace.

Instead, Coach Rod Baker loaded his team on a bus and took them two hours up the road to Springfield, Mass., the town where basketball was invented and the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Nobody was more surprised than the Anteaters to find one of their own on display.

“The highlight had to be seeing Lloyd Mumford in the Hall of Fame,” center Dee Boyer said.

Mumford, it turns out, is visible in a display on the history of the preseason tournament that is held every year in Springfield. Villanova played in the 1990 tournament, and Mumford, then a Wildcat player, is visible on the bench in a picture of then-Coach Rollie Massimino, and can also be seen in the background of videotaped highlights of a Villanova game.

“It surprised me,” Mumford said. “After I saw it, I let ‘em know I’m the only one in the Hall of Fame. Twice .”

His teammates didn’t let the bragging go unchecked.

“He was 6-2, 130, 135,” Khari Johnson said. “The only thing that made him 6-2 was his flat-top was this high.”

The biggest hit with the players wasn’t the displays about basketball’s beginnings and history. Instead, it was a “shooting gallery,” where they heaved basketballs at perhaps a dozen irregular goals of varying heights and rim sizes.

One player, Uzoma Obiekea, had a different mission.

“Oh yeah, I was looking for it all around,” said Obiekea, a center from Oguta, Nigeria.

Obiekea wandered alone through the exhibits until he found one in honor of Houston center Hakeem Olajuwon, whose hometown is a 45-minute flight from Obiekea’s.

Baker peered around another display to discover Obiekea sitting quietly in front of the glass case.

“You worshiping?” he asked Obiekea. “Or just sitting down?”

Not many of the players have a perspective that predates the 1980s. One exception is Keith Walker, the former Brea-Olinda High scoring star who transferred to Irvine from California last year. Among the players who have captured Walker’s fancy are George Mikan, who played for the Minneapolis Lakers in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s; Pete Maravich, who averaged 31 points a game for New Orleans in 1976, and such Celtics of the ‘70s as Dave Cowens and John Havlicek.

“I’m not into the flashy type. I like the ones who are willing to dive on the floor,” Walker said, admitting that he wasn’t that sort himself in high school when he averaged 32.9 points his senior season and led Orange County in scoring. “I never did that in high school. I wasn’t into that.”

Keith Stewart, who grew up in Milwaukee, is another player who can name the stars of long-ago games--way back before pros played in the Olympics or college basketball had a three-point line.

“I enjoyed seeing pictures of my all-time favorite, Milwaukee legend Freddie Brown,” Stewart said. “I have a lot of older brothers, so I grew up with the older players. I started watching games when I was probably 4 or 5 years old. I remember a lot. You see the old games and you say, ‘Oh that’s old so-and-so. Connie Hawkins was another favorite. So was Julius Erving.”

Jeff Von Lutzow takes a shorter view, and doesn’t care much for the stars of yesteryear--or barely even of yesterday.

“It’s weird to see the talent, how it’s gone up over the years from the ‘50s to the ‘90s,” Von Lutzow said. “Right now, my favorite player is probably Scottie Pippen. All-time? Tom Chambers.”

The only other Anteater connections sighted in the Hall of Fame were pictures of former players Scott Brooks and Tod Murphy, both now with the Houston Rockets.

One of Baker’s regrets about the team’s trip was that his college coach and mentor, Holy Cross Coach George Blaney, was unable to see Irvine play.

“I’m disappointed he can’t be there, or it didn’t work out that I could see their game,” Baker said.

The conflict: Holy Cross played at Harvard at 7 p.m. Tuesday on one side of the Charles River, and Irvine played Boston University at 8 p.m. on the other.