I knew wrestlers who loved wrestling because it was an outlet for their anger, but they weren’t the norm. It wasn’t what I loved about wrestling, or about writing. In both cases, I loved the act of perfecting. What the snowshoer and I admired about Coach Dearborn was that he was a perfectionist. He sized you up and taught you what worked for you, and what didn’t.

For wrestling, good balance is important—good balance is also uncoachable. I’m slow to recover my balance when I lose it. Coach Dearborn said this was my chief weakness as an athlete, a sizable liability for a wrestler. For a skier, too, my mother had taught me—it was why I struggled with parallel turns, she’d said. “Your balance isn’t very good, sweetie,” was how she put it, as nicely as she could.

Coach Dearborn taught me to be in control. A mix-up on the mat—a scramble, a free-for-all—favored the better athlete. I learned to keep the score close; I learned that mayhem wasn’t my friend. “In a scramble, Adam, you’re not likely to end up on top,” was the way Coach Dearborn put it, as nicely as he could.

But who told me to apply this principle to writing? No one said I lacked talent as a writer—I just assumed it. From wrestling, I learned to be strategic—I was never spontaneous and I kept myself under control. If I could navigate a wrestling match, why not a novel or a screenplay? In a wrestling match, chaos is the best friend of the better athlete. But why would mayhem be the friend of any writer? Doesn’t a plot imply that you know where you’re going?

As a ski instructor, my mom taught beginners (mostly children) to ski in control. But I didn’t know her when she was a racer. I wasn’t good enough to ski flat out with her. When I saw how my mother reacted to wrestling, I had a picture of her as someone who skied on the edge. When we watched ski races together, she liked the skiers who took the most risks, the ones who looked reckless to me, those downhill racers and slalom skiers who looked off-balance, at times on one ski, borderline out of control.