On April 1, Murray faced Djokovic for the third time in three months, in the finals of the Sony Ericsson. All the little things seemed to favor Murray. Having won two matches by default, he was better rested, and Djokovic, coming off two night matches, would have to adjust to the midday glare and 90-degree heat. And the stadium in Key Biscayne is Murray’s home court, a place where he often practices.

In the end, none of that mattered. Djokovic jumped out in front 3-1, and although Murray competed well in a long second set, he was always behind and usually on the defensive. Says Petchey, who had been so encouraged by Murray’s play in Melbourne: “My personal feeling is he would have been disappointed that he couldn’t affect Novak’s options more than he did. . . . Novak was allowed to play the way he wanted to play.” Gimelstob saw it the same way, as “a regression back to the mean.”

Not Lendl. “I didn’t see any part of the match that was disappointing,” he says. “I had a feeling that if Andy can win the second set he had a very good chance of winning.” Even Murray’s double fault at a critical juncture in the tiebreaker was a “good double — he went for it, it’s not that half-assed serve that goes into the middle of the net.”

After the tournament, Murray put in another week of training with Lendl, but on the clay courts of Europe his form continued to slip: he lost to Tomas Berdych in Monte Carlo, Milos Raonic in Barcelona and Richard Gasquet in Rome, and in the second round of the French Open, in Paris, after he lost the first set to Jarkko Nieminen, he carried on about his hurting back so much that Virginia Wade, calling the match for Euro­sport, said that Murray was “a drama queen,” unprofessional and being unfair to his opponent. Murray, she said, “feels so sorry for himself he has no control over the fact he is not really acting in an adult way.” Three rounds later, in the quarterfinals, Murray lost to David Ferrer, and another major championship had eluded him. Then again, clay is Murray’s weakest surface, and at Wimbledon and even more so at the U.S. Open, he stands a better chance. By then perhaps he’ll have better absorbed Lendl’s concepts or rejected them all together.

One afternoon during the Sony Ericsson tournament, I rented some golf clubs and joined Lendl and his oldest daughter, Marika, at a nearby course. The usual first-tee anxieties were not eased when Marika, who is in her 20s and recovering from shoulder surgery, asked her father for strokes and was refused, or when I informed Lendl I would be playing from the white tees and he shrugged and said, “I didn’t notice you were wearing a skirt.”

Despite the ribbing, father and daughter were very comfortable in each other’s company. Three of Lendl’s daughters received golf scholarships, and Lendl says that every Saturday, he and one daughter, Isabelle, would challenge Marika and another, and one side would invariably leave the course distraught. He also told me about the time he challenged Isabelle, then 10, to her spot on the club ladder and beat her in sudden death. “My wife finds these stories upsetting,” Lendl says. “I think they’re funny.”

More than that, actually. For Lendl, competition is a kind of religion. “If you lose, it hurts, but as long as you have fought hard, you can still feel good about yourself. The next day you go to practice and see what you have to fix,” he said. “It’s the only way I know forward.” After nine holes, Marika begged off, and Lendl and I rolled on in the softening light. As we drove along the 10th fairway, Lendl recalled that Miami is the first place he visited in America, when the Czech tennis federation sent him as a 15-year-old to compete in the Orange Bowl. That time, he lost to Cassio Motta, a Brazilian, but he won the following year. “If you like tennis,” he said, “you should take a drive to Flamingo Park. They still keep a list of winners, and they are some of the great names in tennis history.” (A couple of days later, I took his suggestion. Outside a cement hut, I found a heavily oxidized brass plaque, and there was Lendl, the winner in ’77, below John McEnroe, ’76, and Bjorn Borg, ’72.)