SACRAMENTO, Calif. \u2014 The poet has been upstairs in his office, tapping at the keyboard on various projects. Most of his mornings begin this way \u2026 so much work to do. Some days he tends to his blog<\/a>, and on other days he tidies up his memoir that is nearing publication. Or he may put the finishing touches on another of his mystery novels<\/a>. And of course, his poetry. There is always his poetry.<\/p>\n Much of his poetry chronicles his remarkable life. He was born in Manchuria to Russian parents, and from ages 3 to 6 lived in a World War II internment camp in Tokyo. Just before he turned 7, he crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge. After moving to America, he later became an accomplished professional basketball player who did more than just start alongside Wilt Chamberlain. He was a 1963 NBA All-Star<\/a> and the first player to have his number retired by the Golden State Warriors<\/a>. He also was a failed bookstore owner, coached basketball everywhere from Portland, Ore., to Africa, and spent 24 years teaching high school English.<\/p>\n His eclectic path is made more fascinating in that at 85 he refuses to become idle and bask in the accomplishment of a life well lived. He says he is \u201cobsessed\u201d with being productive, which for him means writing. He has authored five books of poetry. Written two memoirs. Six novels. The majority of his literary work has come after he turned 70. He tries to explain the \u201cwhy\u201d behind his obsession but ultimately concedes that perhaps poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson put it best in Ulysses<\/i>:<\/p>\n How dull it is to pause, to make an end, It\u2019s that last line that particularly resonates with the poet, Tom Meschery. Just because you are breathing doesn\u2019t mean you are living.<\/i><\/p>\n In 2005, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that has no cure. Doctors estimated he had five years to live. Now 19 years later, he is as prolific as ever, even as he sacrifices an afternoon to break from his computer and regale a visitor with stories. He credits medical science, and in particular the drug Revlimid, for keeping his cancer in remission. But he also feels something deeper, something more powerful has been behind his late-life renaissance: a love story. His love story.<\/p>\n He is not big on sentimentality, lest it come across as maudlin. However, he is a romantic and therefore acknowledges that his love story is more than just a poet falling for an artist. Like his poetry, which he says \u201cseems to come out of nowhere,\u201d she came from an online dating site and changed his life. Not only changed it but also played a role in saving it.<\/p>\n \u201cI think love acted as a barrier to the cancer,\u201d Meschery says. \u201cIt was like the door was closed. Maybe it wasn\u2019t locked, but the love was holding onto the door and not letting the cancer in. And that kind of love changed my attitude toward living. I started spending all my time thinking about living, rather than dying.\u201d<\/p>\n When Tom Meschery received his cancer diagnosis in 2005, he was already in a bit of a spiral. He was newly divorced and had just retired from a teaching job he loved. Living in Truckee, Calif., a ski town on the outskirts of Lake Tahoe, he had become engulfed with loneliness. He was 68 and wrestling with his purpose in life. Now, faced with a diagnosis that sounded like a death sentence, he slipped into what he called a suicidal depression.<\/p>\n His spiral was palpable. After separate visits following their father\u2019s diagnosis, his three children \u2014 Janai, Megan and Matthew \u2014 all left concerned.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were all really worried about him,\u201d Matthew says. \u201cNot just because of the cancer, but also the circumstances of him being alone up on the mountain, just going through that mostly by himself.\u201d<\/p>\n The siblings remember comparing notes after visits. They all remarked how the house they grew up in \u2014 one filled with activity, laughter and lively discussion \u2014 had become so quiet.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a house that was always filled with people, a very social place, and dad was always the one holding court,\u201d Janai says. \u201cAnd the contrast \u2026 was hard on all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n By 2008, Meschery could no longer suppress his depression. With Matthew visiting, Meschery remembers halting the ironing of a shirt and blurting out to his son: I\u2019m lonely.<\/p>\n Matthew made a suggestion.<\/p>\n Go online, Dad. Everybody does it.<\/i><\/p>\n So he put himself out there. The poet went on his first date.<\/p>\n \u201cI wasn\u2019t particularly impressed,\u201d he sniffed.<\/p>\n His second foray on the dating site seemed improbable from the get-go. Her name was Melanie Marchant, and her profile picture was stunning. There is no way, he reasoned, that she is in her 60s; she looks 30. And it seemed too perfect that like he, she was creative, an accomplished painter located two hours away in Sacramento. For a month, they chatted online and on the phone. They talked about literature, cooking, her two children and his three.<\/p>\n On Valentine\u2019s Day 2008, a first date was arranged at a Turkish restaurant in downtown Sacramento. As he hurried into the restaurant, late, she was waiting with the maitre d, toe-tapping in mock disgust. She playfully stuck her tongue out at him.<\/p>\n They exchanged cards. His card to her featured the poem Wild Geese <\/i>by Mary Oliver. The poem represented his vulnerability, his willingness to be open.<\/p>\n You do not have to be good. Her card for him? A Valentine left over from one of her grandchildren, featuring Batman. Almost two decades later, it still humors him.<\/p>\n After dinner, they went to her place. She says she had a surprise for him. As they went up the stairs, he became enraptured. Lining the walls of the staircase were religious icons. He was taken back to his youth and his Russian Orthodox roots. Then, the surprise: she had rented \u201cRatatouille\u201d \u2014 the animated movie about a rat who has a nose for cooking \u2014 which played off their frequent conversations about recipes and cuisine.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that was it, babe. I was in love,\u201d he says, throwing his hands in the air. \u201cAs I drove back to the mountains that night, I knew this was going to be a lifetime relationship. I just knew that she and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n One year after their first date, they were married.<\/p>\n She had been divorced for 30 years and says \u201cif you go 30 years, you know when you find something.\u201d They connected over their creative curiosities and their love of literature \u2014 she estimates in their first year of dating they spent between $2,000-$3,000 on books. And soon, she became his trusted editor. He figures she has edited 53,000 pages of his writing.<\/p>\n \u201cI would go through his manuscripts and write \u201cBooooooooring!\u201d Melanie says chuckling. \u201cBut I think his writing is wonderful. I do worry when I ask him how he slept, and he says \u2018Not well \u2026\u2019, because that means he has written another book in his head. He\u2019s got three or four of them up there now.\u201d<\/p>\n He says she has become his muse, but more accurately she has become somewhat of a life coach. She calls him Thomas and he calls her Mel, and they are constantly engaged in playful banter, trying to get the other to chuckle. One of her favorite pastimes is charting who she considers the most handsome players in the NBA<\/a> (De\u2019Aaron Fox<\/a>, Steph Curry<\/a> and Harrison Barnes<\/a> top the current list).<\/p>\n However, she turns stern and blunt when it comes to his cancer. She is adamant that our bodies are not separate from our minds, and from the onset of their relationship, she has conditioned his mind to revel in the now rather than dread what could be ahead.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he told me he had cancer, I said, \u2018Yeah? I know a lot of people who have cancer. When you are 70, people get cancer,’\u201d Melanie says. \u201cI don\u2019t do drama. I don\u2019t do sobbing. What I\u2019m good at is, if there is a problem, it\u2019s not a challenge. You just take it and solve it. And the man I met was so healthy and happy \u2026 he has cancer? Not today. That\u2019s just how I felt.\u201d<\/p>\n His mindset changed. He stopped thinking so much about the future and instead embraced what was in front of him. There was poetry to write, grandchildren to enjoy, dinners to be had and basketball games to watch.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I met Mel, I knew that I had found the love of my life,\u201d Meschery says. \u201cAnd from that point on, I became more positive about myself, about my cancer and about how long I would live. I just couldn\u2019t whine about it with her, she wouldn\u2019t stand it. She inspired me to just let it go, and trust my instincts.\u201d<\/p>\n He is on a maintenance dose of Revlimid \u2014 28 days on the drug, 10 days off \u2014 and every three months he has blood drawn to chart his cell count and presence of proteins. Every test since he has met Melanie has shown the cancer to be in remission.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we laugh about it: Another three months of putting up with me,\u201d Meschery says. \u201cIt has become a much more casual conversation, almost like it\u2019s not life-threatening anymore. And I think that was all her doing, which became my doing. It was like she passed on this belief system to me, and gave it to me as a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n NBA players from the 1960s would chuckle at the idea of Meschery as a poet, trumpeting the powers of love. To them, he was the Mad Manchurian,<\/i> a 6-foot-7 bear of a man who was known for his intensity and physicality, which sometimes morphed into rage. He played power forward, and after 778 career games \u2014 six seasons with the Warriors, who moved from Philly to San Francisco in 1962, and four with the Seattle SuperSonics \u2014 Meschery averaged 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds. But as his nickname suggests, he was as known for his temperament as he was for his skill.<\/p>\n He once grabbed a chair during a game and chased Lakers<\/a> center Darrall Imhoff into the stands. And he remembers fighting Philadelphia<\/a>\u2019s Chet Walker, and after both were ejected, charging at him in the back hallway.<\/p>\n He has yet to reconcile with the dichotomy between how he played and how he views himself. He addressed his unease in his last book of poetry, \u201cClear Path,\u201d with the poem Rumors<\/i>.<\/p>\n He writes of his wife on an airplane, and a passenger remarking to her that Meschery \u201cwas the meanest son of a b\u2014- I\u2019d ever seen play basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2026there was my epitaph being written \u201cIt always shocked me that I often reacted so violently on the court,\u201d Meschery says today. \u201cI know in my heart I was not a violent man. But if you experience violence once in yourself, I think you are forever going to second guess the possibility that it is a part of your personality. And it can hang there for a lifetime. I can\u2019t look in the mirror and see myself as a mean son of a b\u2014-. But I know there was a part of me \u2026 and that poem was part of that reflection that I sensed, and regrettably so, that there is something in me that would allow anger to enter. And it\u2019s not a good feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n He also never bridged the barrier between him and his father, whom he loved but with whom he struggled to connect. His father wanted him to go into the military and never watched him play basketball, deeming it unworthy as a profession. He opened Meschery\u2019s eyes to poetry, as he would recite poems in Russian at the dinner table, unafraid to weep. Meschery says one of the great regrets in his life is not arriving in time to say goodbye to his father before he died. In his first collection of poetry, \u201cNothing We Lose Can Be Replaced,\u201d his piece entitled Tom Meschery <\/i>is essentially a letter to his father, who once asked, \u2018What kind of work is this for a man?\u2019<\/p>\n Old<\/i> immigrant, I admit all this<\/i> Meschery also recounted the night Chamberlain scored 100 points against the Knicks<\/a> in 1962. Meschery started beside Chamberlain and played 40 minutes, amassing 16 points and seven rebounds. In the poem Wilt, <\/i>he captured a viewpoint from the team bus: the contrast between a historic night of work on the hardwood and the ordinary, everyday life in the Pennsylvania countryside.<\/p>\n As a rookie I watched He has more than 100 poems published about sports and quips that he is subconsciously trying to match the 2,841 personal fouls for which he was whistled during his career. When asked if he ever reflects on the breadth and depth of his life\u2019s work, he pauses, then equates measuring his life accomplishments to evaluating his poetry.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I\u2019ve done the best I could,\u201d Meschery says. \u201cIf I look at life like a whole series of poetry \u2026 I can only pick out 15 or 20 poems out of the entire collection that I think are truly inspired poetry. I am just a poet. But I recognize I\u2019ve written some really, really good poems. But I also recognize that a lot of my poetry is \u2026 meh. Not bad. Not awful. And that\u2019s okay. I\u2019m not unhappy about it. That\u2019s a little bit the way life is.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you look at your life and honestly say that most of your life has been inspired? Probably not. But you do pick out those moments when you did really good. And I think I\u2019ve been able to do that. But at the same time, I\u2019m not so egotistical to believe that every moment of my life has been a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sky hook.\u201d<\/p>\n Another force helped pull Meschery out of his malaise following his cancer diagnosis. It was a friend from long ago, one with whom he hadn\u2019t kept in touch: basketball.<\/p>\n In 2006, Matthew, concerned about his father\u2019s well-being, bought him NBA League Pass, a subscription that provides coverage for every NBA game. By then, basketball had become an afterthought for Meschery. He had not been involved in the NBA since 1976 when he finished a two-year stint as an assistant under Lenny Wilkens in Portland. And he hadn\u2019t been involved in basketball period since 1985, when he went to West Africa to coach teams in Mali, Ivory Coast, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo.<\/p>\n When he tuned in, his interest in the NBA was rekindled. He was drawn to his former team, the Warriors, and that 2006-07 team \u2014 an uptempo, free-wheeling and stylistic squad coached by Don Nelson and led by Baron Davis, Monta Ellis, Stephen Jackson and Jason Richardson \u2014 stirred him. He was once again inspired by the game he once played.<\/p>\n \u201cI hadn\u2019t kept up with the NBA, but once I started watching this new version of basketball, I went crazy. I just loved it,\u201d Meschery says. \u201cThe ball was moving \u2026 they were flying through the air \u2026 and I was just astounded these guys could do this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, in 2010, under the new ownership of Joe Lacob, the Warriors reached out to Meschery. The organization wanted to reconnect with its past. Meschery, the first NBA All-Star not born in America, and the first Warriors player to have his number retired, was brought back into the fold. He was invited to games. Introduced to players. He rode in all four championship parades, including 2022, when Warriors star Klay Thompson<\/a> spotted from the team bus Meschery riding on the parade route on Market Street. Thompson got off the bus, and while holding the Larry O\u2019Brien Trophy, beelined for Meschery, wrapping him in a bear hug.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a time when we were worried about my dad losing a sense of himself,\u201d Matthew says. \u201cBasketball was a big part of his life experience and who he is, and the Warriors helped bring that back.\u201d<\/p>\n Before this season, the Warriors asked Meschery to write a poem to commemorate Golden State\u2019s new City Edition uniforms<\/a>, which paid homage to the San Francisco cable cars. Meschery recited Mason Street Line\u00a0<\/em>at the unveiling.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I think back on my cancer, love saved me and helped cure me,\u201d Meschery says. \u201cBut I think the Warriors had a little something to do with it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/i>To rust unburnish\u2019d, not to shine in use!
<\/i>As tho\u2019 to breathe were life!<\/i><\/p>\n
\n Melanie and Tom Meschery at their home in California. (Max Whittaker \/ For The Athletic<\/em>)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/i>You do not have to walk on your knees
<\/i>for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
<\/i>You only have to let the soft animal of your body
<\/i>love what it loves.
<\/i>Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
<\/i>Meanwhile the world goes on.<\/i><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cdn.theathletic.com\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/07145456\/Meschery_011-1024x683.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n
\n Tom Meschery has published over 100 poems about sports and is working to finish his memoir. (Max Whittaker \/ For The Athletic<\/em>)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/i>at ten thousand feet above the earth
<\/i>by a stranger who might have seen me play
<\/i>or maybe not at all, and just heard from someone
<\/i>else that I was mean. How rumors start. How unjust
<\/i>a life can be, viewed through someone else\u2019s eyes.<\/i><\/p>\n
too late. You died before I could explain
<\/i>newspapers call me a journeyman.
<\/i>They write I roll up my sleeves
<\/i>and go to work. They use words
<\/i>like hammer and muscle to describe me
<\/i>\u2026father, you would have been proud of me:
<\/i>I labored in the company of large men.<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/i>Wilt score a century in one game
<\/i>in Hershey, Pa., with the smell
<\/i>of chocolate floating through the arena
<\/i>\u2026but mostly, what I remember about that game
<\/i>is this: \u2026on the bus driving through the dark Amish countryside,
<\/i>outside a farmer in a horse and buggy,
<\/i>hurrying home in the all
<\/i>too brief light of his lantern<\/i><\/p>\n
![\"Tom](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/cdn.theathletic.com\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/05173615\/254E83D6-6223-4272-9919-4BB5A8F1B59D.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n