No less remarkable than Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game is the life story of Tom Meschery, the pugnacious power forward who was the only rookie in the Warriors’ starting lineup that night.

Tomislav Nikolayevich Mescheryakov was born in 1938 in Manchuria, now part of China, his parents having fled the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

His great-grandmother was a Tolstoy who once instructed her distant cousin — the novelist Leo Tolstoy — to leave her house.

“She didn’t like atheists, and she kicked his ass out,” a smiling Tom Meschery told The Press Democrat.

(While Tolstoy was religious, according to some of his own writings, he may have been going through a spiritual crisis the day Meschery’s great-grandmother gave him the boot.)

After spending World War II in a Japanese internment camp, he moved to San Francisco. Bullied in school for being a “pinko” and “commie” — even though his family had opposed the Bolsheviks, or Reds, who executed some of his relatives — he found a vital outlet in sports.

“To me, basketball was citizenship,” he said. “The better I played, the greater an American citizen I would be. So I tended to be more fierce about it.”

That’s putting it mildly. While averaging 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds per game over his decade-long career, Meschery also earned renown as one of the league’s most pugilistic players.

Take, for instance, the night he traded punches with then-Celtic Tom Heinsohn — whom Meschery encountered soon after in a tavern near Boston Garden. Among the topics they discussed was Heinsohn’s passion for fine-arts painting — as referenced in Meschery’s poem, “Tom Heinsohn”:

Today I write poems and admire the back-light

In Wyeth’s painting of the yellow dog sunning himself

In the window and think that the violence

we made together was the work of artists.

Those verses capture the contradictions within Meschery, whose hard-nosed style earned him the nickname The Mad Russian — he prefers The Mad Manchurian — but who enrolled, shortly after his playing career, in the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.

During his four seasons with the Seattle SuperSonics, Meschery was part of a weekly poker game that included Mark Strand, a visiting professor at the University of Washington who later become the U.S. poet laureate.

Strand had good things to say about Meschery’s first collection of poems, “Above the Rim,” published during his final NBA season, and invited the warrior-poet to sit in on his classes.

Later, during his sole season as head coach of the ABA’s Carolina Cougars — the team finished 35-49 — Meschery confessed to Strand that he was miserable in the job.

Strand urged him to apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and wrote him a recommendation. Meschery was accepted, and moved with his young family to the Corn Belt.

During poker parties at their house on Linn Street in Iowa City, his daughter Janai recalls, guests would leave their coats in the master bedroom.

Sneaking out of their rooms past bedtime, she and her two siblings would hide under the coats “and listen to the poker game.”

Among those dropping by for those parties were John Cheever, John Irving, Allan Gurganus and other literary luminaries.

Tom Meschery, meanwhile, was shuttling to and from Portland, Oregon, where he was an assistant coach for the Trail Blazers — while working on his MFA.

Degree in hand, he moved the family to Truckee. Soon after, he started teaching high school in Reno. Tom Meschery opened a bookstore downtown. But it closed after four or five years, said Janai, who recalled that her father was not a good businessman.

That tracks with a self-assessment he shared in a 2011 commencement speech delivered at his alma mater, St. Mary’s College in Moraga.

Tom Meschery, according to Meschery, was “an excellent basketball player, a lousy coach, a terrible bookstore owner, an uninspired house painter, a disorganized administrator, a damn good teacher and an adequate poet.”

Begging to differ, when it came to that last description, was his fellow poet and St. Mary’s Gael, the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award winner Robert Hass, who has likened Meschery’s verses to “a clean jab, straight through, all force and grace.”

The two bards overlapped at the Moraga campus in the early 1960s. At a 2012 reading attended by both, Hass recounted a party where Meschery was seen leaning out of an upper-floor window of Dante Hall declaiming verses from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” which includes the lines:

I have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,

Lighting up, with long violet clots,

Resembling actors of very ancient dramas.

This recent news, that the drama of Chamberlain’s highest scoring night has become a target for skeptics and conspiracy theorists, left him “flabbergasted,” Tom Meschery said.

“I was there. I watched him make the last basket” — a moment narrated by the shouting Campbell of WCAU: “Rebound Luckenbill, back to Rucklick, in to Chamberlain — HE MADE IT! HE MADE IT! HE MADE IT! “A Dipper Dunk! He made it! The fans are all over the floor!”

That excerpt, as doubters are quick to point out, comes from what is only a partial recording of the game. And while there is no telecast from that night, there is Tom Meschery’s poem, “The 100-Point Game,” which draws to a close not in the Hershey Park Arena, but during the journey that followed:

Later, on the bus driving back to Philly I watched a farmer in a horse and buggy

Trotting through dark Amish countryside

Following the brief light of his lantern home.

Distributed by Tribune News Service.