I waved back by waggling. How close was I ?
It depends upon your airspeed, and how hard you were pulling in pitch when you did it. In my opinion, useful stall/spin awareness cannot exist for a pilot who has not actually flown a number of stalls and spins.
The design requirements for certification require that it not be possible for a single engined aircraft to be able to get into an unrecoverable spin, with any use of the controls - but it might take a while to get out, and you could stretch some airplane depending how abusive you are going in.
In some cases, "any use of the controls" included throttle as a control (which in this case I vigorously opposed), but I was overruled and still required to demonstrate 75% power spins in a 210HP Lake Amphibian. It worked, but I'm never doing that again! It did show me though, how a pilot could power themselves into a departure spin (and a climbing turn over/around the trees at the end of a short lake is just the occasion for it to happen). That plane was on its back so fast, it
did make my head spin!