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.