Some tennis books tell a story. This one tells many. Once Upon a Time There Was (My) Tennis is built from short stories, essays, and vignettes that move freely across decades of the sport. It does not follow a traditional narrative arc, but it never set out to do that. The author, Claudio Pistolesi, describes it as a long, free-wheeling conversation, and that feels exactly right. On paper, that structure should feel disjointed. In practice, it works. By the end, the pieces come together in a way that is unexpectedly satisfying. More than that, it feels personal. I finished the book with a genuine sense of kinship with the author, which is not something most sports books achieve.
The tone carries much of that effect. This does not read like a formal autobiography or a carefully engineered coaching manual. It reads like sitting down with someone who has spent a lifetime in tennis and is finally telling the stories that stayed with him. Some are funny, some are reflective, and some are quietly significant. The looseness is the point. The book is less concerned with chronology than with memory, and less concerned with structure than with authenticity.
One of the more striking realizations while reading this book is how much tennis history is simply inaccessible. There are entire eras of the sport, particularly in countries like Italy, that remain largely untranslated and therefore underrepresented in the English-speaking tennis world. Stories, perspectives, and insights exist, but they are not widely available. That makes this book more valuable than it might initially appear. Pistolesi’s interactions with past players and coaches, and moments in the sport, become a kind of bridge to a broader tennis culture that most readers would not otherwise encounter. It also makes me wish more of that history were translated and shared.
Pistolesi comes across not just as a player or coach, but as a student of tennis. He was among the early adopters of working with a sports psychologist, which speaks to a willingness to engage with the mental side of the game before it became mainstream. That curiosity carries through the book. He is constantly observing, learning, and refining his understanding of how tennis works. That mindset helps explain the impact he later had as a coach, where his influence on the sport extended beyond his own playing career.
The book also captures how much the sport has evolved. One of the more thoughtful observations is how many of the most important matches of Pistolesi’s career were barely documented. They existed in memory more than in media. Today, nearly every match is recorded and distributed. That shift has preserved the history of the sport, increased visibility for lower-ranked players, created new sponsorship opportunities, and changed how careers are experienced and remembered. It is easy to take that for granted now. This book is a reminder that it was not always the case.
Some of the most interesting threads in the book connect personal experience to broader changes in the sport. Pistolesi served as the coach representative on the ATP Player Council, where he advocated for the introduction of on-court coaching. That position did not emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped by experiences, including one particularly bizarre code violation incident involving one of his players, which is relayed in the book. It is a good example of how individual experiences can ripple outward into structural change for those who choose to engage.
In one of the book’s more humorous moments, Pistolesi consoles a young Roger Federer after a difficult loss, encouraging him by saying he had the tools to become a Top 5 player one day. That turned out to be a fairly safe bet in hindsight. It is a reminder that even inside the locker room, projecting greatness is an inexact science. Sometimes the future world No. 1 just looks like a talented kid who needs a little reassurance.
Taken as a whole, Once Upon a Time There Was (My) Tennis is not a polished, linear, or tightly structured tennis book. It is something else. It is a collection of moments, reflections, and insights that, taken together, form a picture of a life spent inside the sport. The vignette structure allows those moments to stand on their own while still contributing to a larger whole. It should not work as well as it does, but it does.
I enjoyed this book. Not because it is perfect, but because it feels real. It captures tennis as it is experienced over time, through matches, conversations, decisions, and relationships. It also conveys something that is easy to lose in more formal accounts of the sport. Tennis is not just a sequence of results. It is a collection of stories. This book understands that, and in doing so, it becomes one worth reading.
Once Upon a Time There Was (My) Tennis (<- Sponsored Link)
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