Sylvia Neese, 67, basketball star and writer

An old friend and high school basketball opponent of Sylvia Neese explained Monday how she would have stopped her rival in the late 1950s when Ms. Neese, playing forward for Fort Gaines High School in Fort Gaines in southwest Georgia, was a scoring machine with a fade-away jumper and hook shot.

“I never got to defend her in a game — but I would have tripped her,” said Patricia Alston, laughing. “There was no other way to stop her. You had to rough her up to get the ball. You know?”

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Courtesy of Lindsay Wyatt

Sylvia Neese, a basketball standout at Fort Gaines High School who once scored 51 points in a game, became an avid traveler.

Ms. Alston recalled that Ms. Neese was such a terror in those days she scored 51 points in a game. Once, during practice, another team’s coach wore Ms. Neese’s jersey number, 11, to inspire players. Instead, they were intimidated.

“The story goes that the whole time the coach was wearing her number the players who were practicing free throws didn’t hit a single shot,” said Ms. Alston.

Ms. Neese, 67, died last Thursday in her Atlanta home after a long and intermittent battle with cancer that began in 1993.

Friends remembered her as a fiercely competitive athlete who could be just as passionate about tending to stray cats that lived in woods behind her home, or helping run the Licklog Players community theater in Hayesville, N.C., as she could be about trouncing you on the tennis court.

“I played tennis with her twice, and that was enough,” said Ms. Alston. “I couldn’t return her serve. It was too fast.”

Her partner of 22 years, Lindsay Wyatt, recalled that Ms. Neese also had the talent of “all true Southerners — she was a great storyteller.” And that gift, said Ms. Wyatt, made her a natural fit when back in 1989 Ms. Wyatt and friends decided to enter a writing contest sponsored by Ted Turner to pen a novel that projected a positive view of the world’s future.

The novel, “City of Dreamers,” was written by Ms. Wyatt, Ms. Neese, and eight others in a year of weekly sessions and was published under the pseudonym Jordon Avery. The story fused fantasy and imagery and a cast of characters that included a wild dolphin, a scientist and a 9-year-old boy. It didn’t win the contest, so the authors paid $3,400 to self-publish 750 copies.

“Sylvia wasn’t a writer, but she so good at spinning a tale, and she really contributed a lot to the story line,” said Ms. Wyatt. The School Library Journal, a trade publication for librarians, praised “City of Dreamers” for its “unique plot, the abundance of dialogue and the easy reading level.”

For the past 16 years Ms. Neese divided her time between friends in Atlanta and a mountain home in Young Harris. She became an avid world traveler, took up scuba diving and golf, and loved to hike the mountains, streams and water falls of North Georgia.

“We also called her the ‘bird whisperer,’” said Ms. Wyatt. “She was always rescuing birds or just talking to them.”

A memorial service is scheduled for 3 p.m. July 11 at Fort Gaines Methodist Church in Fort Gaines.