“She said, ‘You’re kidding me’ and went straight to bed, disgusted.” Golf would hardly appear to be a bloody-enough substitute, although the sport has changed, especially in the girls’ section which is easily the fastest growing in the game in numbers and competitiveness. “I told her there’s no checking in women’s hockey,” says Ivan. “Why didn’t she just smash her into the glass?” she asked when a player pressed another against the boards. (Or should that be two down with three to play?) Daniela is the most headstrong and most similar to her father.

Nicknamed “Crash” because of a propensity for charging into static objects, she summed up her view on sport when she was eight. She had informed her stunned parents that she was going to be an ice hockey professional and persuaded them to let her stay up to see a women’s match. In it, he wrote of the father coming across as “half dictator, half minor functionary with purely ceremonial duties”. As he is outnumbered six-to-one, even his wife sometimes feels sorry for him “All the girls gang up on him,” says Samantha “They have an ongoing battle for control. They’re trying to take it and he’s trying to maintain it.” So far, Ivan seems to be a break down in the third. Apart from that, it has been a season of success as she has established herself as the No 1 Lendl, a ranking that will soon have some relevance in world golf if the family’s ambition is any gauge at all. A fascinating insight into this most competitive of households was provided recently in an article in The New Yorker magazine, in which the author, a family friend, spent a day at Lendl towers.

Isabelle can beat almost everybody now, certainly anybody in her age group and, indeed, most women in the game. Last year she was the youngest qualifier in the US Women’s Amateur and last month was besides herself when she failed to get through to the US Women’s Open and her first major. “Dad would play with us and teach us how to play and what to do,” recalls Isabelle “But I can beat him now. Off the men’s tees.” As someone so proud of his own scratch handicap that not too long ago he harboured thoughts of turning professional himself, the old man admits that – begrudgingly In truth, it is no shame. But the reality is nothing like that, even if her introduction to the game may make it seem so. Just over three years ago, Marika gave up tennis and assigned the void in her heart over to having a pet.

“There was so much pressure in tennis, you know?” she remembers. “People kept asking, ‘Are you going to be just like your dad?’ I needed to do something different.” Her father knew just the thing. “She really wanted a dog and I kept telling her no,” he says. “I told her I don’t care if you pick a sport and want to do it professionally or just for fun, but you have to do something.” Marika buckled and a compromise was struck – a German Shepherd and she would join her golf-obsessed father on the course.

Isabelle had already succumbed and was improving by the day, the round, the shot Startlingly so. ” It would be tempting to envisage Ivan the Terrible bursting into her bedroom, flailing a two-iron, a bag of balls and a pair of golf spikes and screaming “get back to work”. His eldest enrolled first and, last year, so did Isabelle and Daniela and soon the household was ringing to the sound of early-morning alarm calls. Dedication in teenaged girls has rarely been expressed so blearily Take Marika’s day. Her regular, out-of-competition schedule starts by getting up at 6am, having a half-hour work-out before striding to the first tee for 7.30am. Class then follows from noon to 4pm, followed by another work-out, some homework and, if she is lucky, a few holes, or more practice, before bedtime “I love it,” she says, without a moment’s hesitation “But I’m so tired on my days off, all I want to do is sleep. “The person who won all those tennis tournaments seems like somebody else now, so who cares what I did 15 or 20 years ago?” he asks.