Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Thread...
Say what you will about Russians, they have produced some of the weirdest and awesomest international sports stars of all time. And they are completely unknown in Russia.
Here are three such stories.

1. Leo Tolstoy's relative who played in Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game.
Tom Meschery (real name Tomislav Nikolayevich Meshcheryakov) was born in Harbin, China. His father was a White Guard officer, his mom a scion of nobility, a daughter of the head of the Holy Synod...

When I met Meschery in his home in Truckee, CA, he told me his first childhood memory was of a concentration camp in Japan. He came to the US as a child and became a basketball star in Northern California. His dad absolutely hated it and never saw a single game.

In the 1950s, his dad and some Russian buddies got drunk on vodka and drove to Palo Alto in order to assassinate Alexander Kerensky, the exiled leader of the Russian liberal revolution, who was giving a lecture at Stanford. Luckily, they crashed the car on the way...

Meschery played in the NBA for the Warriors and the Sonics and was Phila's third-best scorer in Wilt's 100-point game. He said the entire arena in Hershey stunk of chocolate and they all wanted to get out of there ASAP. After retirement, he wrote poetry and taught English lit...

He speaks passable Russian, declaims classical poetry, blogs (mescherysmusings.blogspot.com). He is the first of 2 Russians to play in the All-Star Game & he is inducted into the Utah Literature Hall of Fame, which is a thing. His nicknames were "Manchurian Candidate" and "Mad Russian"

2. The first gaijin to be inducted into Japan's baseball hall of fame.
Victor Starffin (real name Viktor Konstantinovich Starukhin) was born in the Urals in 1916. His family emigrated to Harbin when he was a baby because his dad was rich and had wouldn't survive under the Soviets

They moved to Japan when Victor was 13 & he picked up baseball in school. He was scouted by Matsutaro Shoriki, the father of Japanese baseball. When his dad (Russian White Guard dads!) was accused of murder, Shoriki made sure he got off easily so that Victor wouldn't be deported.

But Shoriki's condition was: Victor must play pro baseball, which put the end to the boy's dream of going to college. He became an huge star in the Japanese pro circuit, earning two MVPs and becoming the first pitcher to win 300 games...

Despite this, Starukhin suffered from xenophobia (at one point he was forced to change his name to Suda Hiroshi, which, shockingly, didn't help) and during the war spent some time in an internment camp. He changed his name to the more American-like Starffin afterwards...

He did manage to return to the pros, despite damaging his health in the camps, and was known as "The Blue-Eyed Japanese." His later life was marked by depression, alcoholism and tragedy. Victor Starffin died when his car collided with a train in 1957. He was 41...

3. A Russian prince and a hero of English rugby.
Prince Alexander Sergeevich Obolensky was a direct descendant of Rurik, the semi-legendary Viking founder of Russia. His father was an officer of the Imperial Guard, his mom came from the same family as Peter the Great's mother...

They emigrated after the revolution, when Prince Alexander was 1 year old. For most of his life, he wasn't even naturalized as his family firmly believed the whole "communist nonsense" would end any day now and they'd all return to their splendid lives...

Prince Alexander went to posh public schools and to Oxford, but he was an indifferent student, paying much more attention to rugby, at which he excelled. At the age of 18, he played for one of the top clubs in England. At 20, he was invited to play for England vs. New Zealand.

The young Russian, who just managed to obtain his British citizenship, scored 2 tries in the match, one of them widely regarded the greatest run of its day. He was called "The Flying Slav" and was a rugby legend before he was out of school.
In 1939, he was commissioned to the RAF

Obolensky never made it to the front. In 1940, he crashed his plane during a training flight and was killed at 24.
He is well remembered in England to this day, but almost nobody knows anything of him in Russia.

Honorable mention goes to Alexander Jesaulenko, a Ukrainian refugee whose father collaborated with the Nazis. The family emigrated to Australia where "Jezza" became a legend of Australian Rules football.
Russians and sports. One could make an HBO series...