But the reason Elliot tried wrestling in the first place, and the foremost reason he wanted me to try it, was the coach. Mr. Dearborn had been a Big Ten champion and a two-time All-American at Illinois. An NCAA runner-up, he was overqualified for the job of coaching wrestling at Exeter—his teams dominated New England interscholastic wrestling for years. The snowshoer wanted me to try wrestling because he knew Mr. Dearborn was a good coach. My mom had wanted me to have my own faculty person at the academy, someone “like a father”—someone who treated me like his own faculty brat. Elliot Barlow was a good stepfather to me, from the start. His instinct to match me with Coach Dearborn was the first instance of the snowshoer’s steering me through Exeter.

I’d missed seeing the coach carry the diaper man’s body from the croquet court, but I remembered his doing lunges with my mom at her wedding—when I’d mistaken their lunges for dancing.

“You’ll need someone to help you at the academy,” my mother had told me. Elliot found the good teachers for me—he put me in their hands. Substitute Fathers, I would title an early novel—a bad title for fictional amalgams of my teachers and coaches. I changed it.

Coach Dearborn was an honest man. He said I wouldn’t ever be better than “halfway decent” as a wrestler—not for lack of good coaching, or good workout partners. I just wasn’t the athlete my mother was. “That you’re not very talented needn’t be the end of it,” Coach Dearborn told me. When I was a beginner as a writer, with no confidence in my talent for storytelling, I took what my first wrestling coach told me to heart. I never believed I was very talented, but that wouldn’t be the end of it.

When I started wrestling at Exeter, the wrestling room was in the basement of the old gym. The rope we climbed every day, before and after practice, hung from the low ceiling. Some of the smaller wrestlers, Elliot included, had to be lifted up to reach the chinning bar. I began wrestling on horsehair mats, which were covered with a filmy plastic sheeting—a preventative but ineffective measure against mat burns. The shock-absorbing abilities of those old horsehair mats were nonexistent in comparison to the new Resilite mats, which arrived at Exeter in my second or third year. I can’t remember exactly when this happened, but we were excited to move to our new wrestling room. It was on the upper level of the Thompson Cage—where the wooden track was. We had a higher ceiling for our rope climbing. We had more than one chinning bar. Mr. Barlow was still the best rope climber in the room—he could do the most chin-ups, too.

Coach Dearborn wasn’t very enthusiastic about lifting weights. “You want to lift, just wrestle more,” he would say. Maybe it was an Illinois or a Big Ten thing, but Coach Dearborn believed that rope climbing and chin-ups were the best strength training for wrestlers. “There’s more pulling than pushing in wrestling,” he said. Coach Dearborn wasn’t impressed by the bench press. “Just stay off your backs,” he liked to say.