It was Jack Kramer Day in Los Angeles on July 21st and, being on another continent at the time, I nearly missed it! But I can’t let such an occasion pass without comment.

Jack Kramer, apart from being the 1947 Wimbledon champion, is a giant of the game; a legend; a grandfather of professional tennis. In those dark days when the word “professional” was spoken of with disdain by members of country clubs and Federation officials around the world, Kramer bought a professional troupe off Bobby Riggs and, using his great entrepreneurial skills, kept it alive by offering contracts to each Wimbledon champion as their name went up on the honor board at the All England Club.

It didn’t make him popular but it kept up the pressure on the amateur establishment to look long and hard at the absurdity of keeping amateurs and professionals apart. By the time Frank Sedgman, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Ashley Cooper, Mal Anderson, Alex Olmedo and Rod Laver (all Grand Slam winners even if Rosewall and Anderson missed out at Wimbledon) had signed up, the International Federation was feeling the draft. In the early sixties, Kramer met with Jean Borotra, one of the great Four Musteketeers who was President of the French Federation at the time, at the Hotel Scribe in Paris to try and thrash out a way to bring in Open Tennis. But it was too early. Too many stuffy, prejudiced, blazored buffoons were still in positions of influence for the likes of Borotra  and others to create the necessary revolution.

Only when Herman David, chairman of the All England Club, finally threw open the gates of Wimbledon to anyone qualified to play no matter what their status, did Open Tennis arrive in 1968.

Kramer quickly set about trying to bring about some order to the new circuit and, while Lamar Hunt set the standard with his World Championships Tennis tour administered by former British No. 1 Mike Davies, Jack and Donald Dell created the Grand Prix circuit which, in effect, still exists today in the form of the ATP Tour.

Having been embraced briefly by the establishment, Kramer found himself on the opposite side of the still fractious political divide again when the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) was formed in 1972. He had accepted the players’ offer to become the first ATP Executive Director (a job he took on for no pay) and led the fledgling organization through its game-changing boycott of Wimbledon in 1973 — a contentious move that finally broke the back of the amateur establishment’s control over the careers of professional athletes.

These are the bare bones of Kramer’s influence but, working for him as I did in the mid-seventies, I had a chance to enjoy the full force of this open, charming, tough, no-nonsense character at close quarters. Although I was running the ATP’s European office from Paris, I spent a few weeks working alongside Jack at the offices he had been loaned by the owner of the May Company store on Pico Boulevard just down the road from 20th Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles.

If there was one thing that stood out about Kramer, it was his unbounded enthusiasm for the game and its players. Sometimes, when his secretary was out to lunch, the phone would ring and some rookie pro trying to find out if he had got into the next tournament would find himself talking to the man himself.

“Hiya, kid! How can I help?” Jack would ask. And, as the young man spluttered out his question, Kramer would go into all the details of the player’s ranking and where and how he needed to travel to his next destination. Nothing was too much for Jack and, as a friend and a colleague, I will always treasure what he has brought to our sport.

For the tennis person, Spain’s Costa del Sol — the strip of coastline that runs from Gibraltar in the west and past Malaga to the east — offers a playground of possibilities. There are all manner of places to play, some of which will cost you a couple of bucks and others almost nothing.

But it is not just the availability of courts — clay or hard — but the personalities you are likely to run into that makes it an especially stimulating place to play.

I got to know the area well in the eighties and nineties when I had a small apartment at Lew Hoad’s Campo de Tenis and an equally small dwelling in a fourteenth century castle — fortress, really — high above Sotogrande called El Castillo de Castellar. In a world that was as far removed from the glitz of the over-built coastline as it was possible to imagine, you could look out over Gibraltar to the Riff Mountains in Morocco. At night, the only sound was the tinkling of goat bells. It was built by the Moors and they knew what they were doing. Save for an air strike, it would still be able to defend the place with a few arrows and a good supply of burning oil.

Jenny Hoad still owns one of the village houses inside the walls and although she has sold her late husband’s club down the coast at Mijas she maintains a residence there as well and is to be found on the courts several times a week, as befits a talented left hander who was one of Australia’s leading women players in the fifties.

Returning after an absence of four years, it was to Lew’s that I took my young son to show him around and meet up with old friends. On the terrace, leading off the bar where Hoad was always to be found, beer in hand, greeting members and friends, we lunched with Jenny and Dominique Nastase, a long time local resident and ex-wife of you know who.

Apart from being the greatest player I ever saw until Roger Federer arrived on the scene, Hoad was a wonderful guy and a loyal friend, a man who never traded on his fame and was dismissive of any fawning hangers-on who tried to invade his privacy. His death, just before his sixtieth birthday of an incurable form of leukemia, was a tragedy. Players flocked to the memorial tournament that was held at his club soon after his death during Wimbledon 1993 and the reaction of Rod Laver, who freely admits Hoad was a player he could hardly ever beat, said everything about the esteem in which the great blond Australian was held. Laver had landed back at Los Angeles Airport after a visit to London when he heard of Lew’s death and the tournament that was being held in his honor. So he booked himself straight back on the first flight out to Spain — a lot of flying hours to honor a friend but Laver thought nothing of it. “Lew was my hero,” he said.

Moving along the coast to Marbella, we were billeted in some style at the sumptuous Hotel Puente Romano which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year. It is twinned with the slightly older Marbella Club just down the road where, it was rumored, Ion Tiriac was taking a brief respite from the onerous duties of running a tournament in Madrid and half a dozen businesses in Bucharest.

We were joined at breakfast one morning by Manolo Santana who turned tennis from an exclusive country club sport into a game for the masses by winning Wimbledon in 1966. As the son of a groundsman at a club in Madrid, Santana, who also won the US Championships at Forest Hills on grass in 1965 as well as two Roland Garros titles, proved that a ball boy with a sharp brain if little formal education could go on to achieve great things. And not only on a tennis court. Santana’s charm and business acumen enabled him to work for Philip Morris for many years and, after a long spell as Tennis Director at the Puente Romano, to build his own club in the hills just about the hotel.

Santana enjoyed his time front and center in that row of the Royal Box at Wimbledon, flanked by Pete Sampras on one side and Bjorn Borg and Laver on the other.

“I looked one way and saw Pete with his fourteen Grand Slam titles and then on the other side Bjorn with his six French and five Wimbledons and Rocket with his two Slams and I felt happy that I had at least won four!” Santana laughed. “We had such a good time, talking over old times and admiring Roger Federer for his amazing achievements. But I think we all felt sorry for Andy Roddick. Such a tough one to lose. And he has improved his game so much.”

Santana is a fixture on the coast but it was more of a surprise to run into Richard Krajicek, the big Dutchman who interrupted Sampras’s seven year winning streak at Wimbledon by winning the title in 1996, after beating Pete in the quarter-finals 7-5, 7-6, 6-4 — one of the biggest Wimbledon upsets of the last two decades.

Krajicek and his family have a home on the Costa del Sol where they spend several weeks every year and he had brought his 10-year-old son Alex along to Puente Romano to have a hit with Christopher Cosgrave, the son of an Irish family who have an apartment overlooking the courts. Alex is built like his Dad; has a similarly constructed serve and is already one of the best players for his age in Holland. Cosgrave has talent, too, and is equally nuts about the game. Watch out for their names in international junior events in the years ahead. Ireland could certainly do with a good tennis player!

As we sat on the terrace, watching the kids play, I had the chance to pose a question I had long been wanting to ask Richard. ”

How come you suddenly developed a backhand service return at Wimbledon that year?”

He smiled, knowing full well that the shot had been his weakness, every bit as much as his fantastic serve and huge wingspan on the volley  — shots that had helped him reach the semifinals at the Australian and French Opens as well as four quarterfinals at the US Open — had been his strengths. But on grass, that inability to return serve with any consistency on the backhand had hampered his progress until, out of the blue, it all fell into place in 1996.

“I’m not really sure how it happened,” he said. “I think the main thing was that I just relaxed and took the pressure off myself. Suddenly I found I could hit the shot the same way I had always been able to hit it in practice.”

On that particular occasion, it certainly took care of the mighty Sampras serve and Krajicek, now tournament director of the ATP event in Rotterdam, went on to beat MaliVai Washington in straight sets in the final.

So if you are heading for southern Spain and the adjacent wonders of Granada and Seville, take your racket. If you phone Lew Hoad’s Campo de Tenis on (34) 952 474 908 you can probably arrange temporary membership for a nomimal sum. The Hotel Mijas up the hill offers excellent accommodation for about $100 a night. Five times that will get you a room at the Puente Romano where the tennis center has magnificent spa facilities along with a dozen courts of clay and hard for $30 an hour.

A wide selection of hotels along the coast also have tennis facilities and you will be very unlucky if the weather anything but perfect.

It will be the coached against the coachless in the men’s singles final at Wimbledon. Roger Federer will have his team around him, of course, but they do not include an official coach while the man of the moment — other than Andy Roddick himself — will be sitting in the American player’s box seats, hoping that he can carry out the pre-match plan as expertly as he did against Andy Murray. 

Larry Stefanki, one time mentor to Marcelo Rios, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Fernando Gonzalez and even John McEnroe,  is not giving away any secrets about how to beat Federer but he was still reflecting on his man’s great semifinal performance after a practice sessions at the All England Club today. 

“After losing to Murray in Doha, when he charged the net the whole match, going in on everything and getting beaten 6-4, 6-2 we threw that plan out the window,” said Stefanki who talks at about the rate Roddick serves. ” ‘You’re not doing that again’, I told him, so we had a different strategy and Andy was able to execute perfectly. Serving more into the body was one thing we agreed on because you have to try something different against someone who returns so well. And not being afraid to wait for the right moment to go in. And mixing it up. The drop shots were great. He’s never used that so effectively before.”

But Stefanki is under no illusions how close it was.

“Listen, two or three points could have changed the whole match, the whole outcome,” he admitted. “That volley on set point in the third — he mis-hit it anyway and it could easily have gone into the net. If Murray had won that set I think he would have won the match. And the three breaks points Andy saved from 0-40 in the first game of the fourth — any one of those to Murray and he could have been through that set in flash — boom, different match.”

Stefanki is a big admirer of Murray and thought seriously about taking up an offer to coach the young Scot when he was still a teenager. Having spent eighteen months helping Tim Henman, he is used to the British environment but the travelling required to have done the job would have taken him away from his southern California base and his young family for too long and he wasn’t prepared to do that. But he feels Murray needs to be listening to those who feel he needs to be more aggressive.

“He doesn’t make the transition from defense to attack often enough or aggressively enough and at this level you have to,” says Stefanki. “Standing that far back on a worn grass court is not going to get the job done.”

It will be fascinating to see how Roddick handles the biggest challenge of his career on Sunday.  He’s been there twice before, in a Wimbledon final with Federer across the net, but there is no question that he is better equipped to handle it now. And, after consulting his coach, he will most certainly have a plan. How the five-time champion deals with it will decide the outcome.