My Journey with the Bonardi Method
So, I decided to give this B. Bonardi tennis thing a shot. I’d been stuck, you see. My game, especially my backhand, just wasn’t getting any better. Felt like I hit a wall. Then I heard about this coach, Bonardi, from a guy down at the local courts. This guy, he suddenly started playing lights out, and when I asked him his secret, he just muttered “Bonardi.” That got me thinking.
First, I had to actually find the guy. Wasn’t like he was advertising. Took some digging, asking around. Finally got a number for him. Called up, and this gruff voice on the other end just gave me a time and an address for some old, kinda forgotten courts on the edge of town. Honestly, when I pulled up, I nearly drove off. Place looked like it hadn’t seen a groundskeeper in years.
My first session was, well, different. Bonardi, this older fella, barely spoke. He just had me hit. For what felt like forever. Then, he walks over, picks up my fancy new racket, puts it aside, and hands me this ancient wooden thing. Heavy as a log. “Feel the ball,” he grunted. That was pretty much his entire instruction for the first day.
- I started hitting with that old clunker. My arm felt like it was going to fall off.
- He had me doing these exaggerated, super slow-motion swings. I felt like a fool.
- We didn’t do any complex drills. Just back and forth, him feeding balls, me trying to “feel” them with that medieval torture device he called a racket.
This went on for weeks. Swing slow. Feel the contact. Forget power. I was getting seriously frustrated. My regular game buddies started giving me looks. “Still doing that weird Bonardi stuff?” one of them asked, smirking. I even started to doubt it myself. My scores in friendly matches were actually getting worse.
Then there was this one day, I remember it was drizzling, court was a bit slick. Bonardi had me doing this footwork drill that felt more like learning some old-fashioned dance than playing tennis. I was clumsy, all over the place. And then, splat. Slipped and went down, twisted my ankle a bit. Nothing broken, but it hurt, and I was just lying there, rain in my face, thinking, “That’s it. I’m done with this nonsense.”
Bonardi, he just strolled over, looked down at me without a shred of sympathy, and said, “Get up. The court is for playing, not for napping.” It wasn’t mean, but it was so blunt, so direct. For some reason, instead of getting angry, I just… got up. My ankle throbbed, but I picked up that wooden racket and got back to the baseline. I think, deep down, I was too stubborn to quit after a fall.
And you know what? That fall, that gruff comment, it was like something clicked. I stopped overthinking, stopped fighting his strange methods. I just did what he said. Slowly, very slowly, my shots started to feel different. Especially that backhand. It wasn’t a killer shot all of a sudden, but it was consistent. I was actually starting to understand what he meant by “feeling the ball.”
Bonardi never taught me any flashy new techniques. He didn’t promise to make me a champion. He just stripped my game back to the absolute basics and rebuilt it. After a few months, one day he just watched me hit a few, nodded, and said, “Okay. You listen to the ball now. Go play.” And that was that. No big goodbye.
My tennis is better. Not world-beating, but better. More solid. More thoughtful. It’s funny, that whole experience with Bonardi, it reminds me of this awful job I had once at a marketing agency. All slick presentations and buzzwords, promising the moon to clients, but underneath it was all just… fluff. Nothing real. Bonardi, he was the opposite. No gloss, all substance. Made me appreciate the things that are a bit rough around the edges but actually work.
