In late May, with most of the world’s best tennis players focused on the red clay at the French Open, Sir Andy Murray was 300 miles away on the other side of the English Channel, dialed in on preparations for the grass at Wimbledon.

That had been the plan, anyway. But then his wife, Kim Sears, had to head up to Scotland for a few days to handle some business at the hotel she and Murray own. That left him solo for the morning rituals beginning at 5:30 a.m. with their four children, all younger than 8: cooking breakfast, getting everyone dressed and dropping them off at school.

Three hours later, with the last child delivered, he headed to Britain’s national tennis center in Roehampton, where he received treatment from his physiotherapist and trained for several hours on the grass court and in the gym. There was also an afternoon of interviews and shooting promotional videos. It’s all part of the next phase of Murray’s quixotic, late-career quest to finish his journey on his terms, metal hip and all.

Maybe that means somehow recapturing the magic of 10 years ago, when he became the first British man in 77 years to win the most important title in his sport. Maybe it’s simply cracking the top 30 or 20 once more, proving wrong all the doctors and doubters who called him foolish for entertaining a future in professional tennis after hip resurfacing surgery in 2019.

Or maybe it’s pushing off for however long he can be the full-time tennis elder, entrepreneur and someone who, years ago, did that glorious thing.

The default demeanor that accompanies Murray’s grueling physical play has always looked something like misery, peppered with a near-constant verbal self-flagellation that pulls spectators into his battle. But there is also joy in the training, the competing, the quest to improve and get the most out of himself while doing something that he loves, even when that means struggling against seemingly inferior opponents. Murray knows nothing else he does will ever match the feeling. So he goes on, results be damned.

“I’m jealous of your Jannik Sinners and these young guys that have got an amazing career to look forward to,” he said during a recent interview at the end of that harried day as he headed for the tennis center parking lot. “I would love to do it all over again.”

‘An Outrageous Career’

A decade on from the moment Britain had been waiting on since the Great Depression, Murray returns to the All England Club a version of himself that he could not have imagined in 2013, when he was just another 20-something bloke who walked his dogs in London on the south bank of the Thames.

The tennis obsessive is now a man in full: a husband of eight years; a father of four; an officer of the Order of the British Empire (hence the “sir”); an art collector; an entrepreneur with a portfolio that includes a hotel, a clothing line and other investments; and the wise man, sounding board and occasional practice partner for the next generation of British tennis stars, such as Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu.

Mirra Andreeva, the 16-year-old Russian phenom, would like some time with him, too. She called him “so beautiful” this spring.

Regrets, he has a few, especially in those years in his 20s when he trained like a fiend and viewed time with friends and family as an impediment to a tireless search for every ounce of success. Another speed workout. More lifting, or hot yoga, or hitting practice balls. Why did he make life so difficult for his coaches? Why did he eat all those sweet-and-sour candies? Why did he stay up until 3 a.m. playing video games so often?

The lazy view of Murray, who plays Ryan Peniston of Britain in the first round on Tuesday, is a player with just three Grand Slam singles titles, the same as Stan Wawrinka, who is a fine champion but no one’s idea of an all-time great. Novak Djokovic just won his 23rd. Rafael Nadal has 22; Roger Federer, 20. They are the so-called Big Three.

Djokovic said recently he doesn’t much like that term because it excludes Murray, a player he has been battling since his days on the junior tennis circuit. The longtime mates practiced together on Saturday at the All England Club.

There is a reason Federer included Murray as a central character in his send-off last year at the Laver Cup. Murray has beaten Djokovic, Nadal and Federer a combined 29 times, including two wins over Djokovic in Grand Slam finals. He made 11 Grand Slam singles finals during the most competitive era of elite men’s tennis. Only he, Nadal, Federer and Djokovic held a No. 1 ranking between 2004 and 2022. And he withstood unmatched pressure during his run to that first Wimbledon title.

“It’s an outrageous career,” said Jamie Murray, a top doubles player who teamed with Andy, his younger sibling, in 2015 to deliver Britain its first Davis Cup triumph since 1936.

Or it was an outrageous career, until that grueling physical style exacted its toll on Murray’s back and ankles and eventually led to the degenerative hip condition that stymied his run at the top in 2017. In January 2018, Murray had an initial unsuccessful hip surgery. For the rest of the season, everyone saw him suffering and limping through the pain.

At the 2019 Australian Open, Bob Bryan, a 23-time Grand Slam doubles champion, put his breakfast tray down at Murray’s table and told him about the hip resurfacing surgery he had undergone the previous summer. The operation allowed Bryan to return to high-level competition doubles in just five months. Elite singles was something else entirely.

“‘All I want to do is play,’” Bryan said Murray told him.

Later that month, Murray posted a startling photo on Instagram that showed him lying in a hospital bed.

“I now have a metal hip,” he wrote after the roughly two-hour resurfacing procedure that replaced the damaged bone and cartilage with a metal shell. “Feeling a bit battered and bruised just now but hopefully that will be the end of my hip pain.”

Murray’s pain had grown so severe that the primary goal of the operation was to give him the ability to play with his children.

For the next six months, he attacked physical therapy and rehabilitation the way he had attacked tennis. He was a full-time father. He played golf. He hung around with old friends.

Matt Gentry, Murray’s longtime agent and business partner, said the downtime gave Murray a window into life without tennis. It wasn’t terrible.

Murray has long admired American sports stars who take an entrepreneurial approach to their careers, and he and Gentry began to map out opportunities. Murray has since launched a clothing line. He has invested with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in TMRW Sports, a company that is seeking to find new ways to marry sports media and technology, including a new golf competition. He is part of a group that is building thousands of padel courts at sports clubs throughout the United Kingdom.

In 2013, he purchased Cromlix House, a 15-room castle-like hotel near his childhood home in Dunblane, Scotland, for roughly $2 million. The property was especially meaningful: His grandparents held their 25th anniversary party there in 1982. He and Sears held their wedding reception there. His brother, Jamie, also got married at the property.

Murray and Sears recently completed the first phase of a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion of the property that will eventually include cabins by the nearby loch. The hotel is home to several pieces of art from Murray’s private collection, including a series of Damien Hirst and David Shrigley prints.

For now, Murray said, he mostly listens to pitches and writes checks, but he plans to become more involved in his business ventures when he is done playing tennis. If he has his way, that day will not arrive for some time.

‘Why Shouldn’t He Keep Playing?’

Murray’s mother, Judy, a former player who was his first tennis coach, said tennis allows her son to express so many parts of his identity, beginning with a burning need to compete, but also an analytical mind that loves studying the game and its history.

From the time he was a small boy, she said, if a game of cards or dominoes wasn’t going his way, those cards and dominoes would go flying across the room. He also had an older and bigger brother he desperately wanted to beat, and plenty of people who said that a boy from a small town in Scotland, where the weather was terrible and indoor courts were scarce, could never win Wimbledon. Now those same people say his time has passed.

“If he still loves it, then why shouldn’t he keep playing?” Judy Murray said in an interview on Friday.

Murray said he has a rough idea of when and how he would like his tennis career to end, but he knows it might not be his choice. Federer desperately wanted to play more, but his knee wouldn’t allow it. Murray has seen the videos of Nadal limping off the court in Australia in January with a torn muscle and hip injury from which he may never fully recover.

Murray knows that his next desperate sprint for a drop shot, or one of his signature points earned while running the baseline back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, could be his last. Then again, he could still be doing this three years from now, which carries its own unique complications.

He recently ran out of his stash of the bulky, extra-support tennis shoes that Under Armour manufactured for him until their last partnership deal expired. So Murray had to call his friend Kevin Plank, the Under Armour founder, and ask if he could make him more shoes. Plank did.

In early June, when Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz and nearly everyone else of consequence was playing in Paris, Murray was playing a Challenger tournament at a racket club in Surbiton, southwest of London, in the tennis minor leagues.

The field was made up of pro-tour deep cuts and some early round French Open casualties. A crowd of hundreds packed the stands, which were set on shaky scaffolding.

Murray took only a few games against Chung Hyeon, a journeyman from South Korea, to show why he is certain he can beat anyone in the world on grass at a time when so few pros have mastered the surface: the slice backhands that go successively lower until they barely bounce above an opponent’s shoelaces; the dying volleys in the front of the court, and the stinging ones to the baseline; the slice serve that slides so far off the court; the softballs that look like meatballs but are really knuckleballs, wobbling in the air and twisting when they hit the grass.

Two weeks and two Challenger trophies later, Murray had claimed 10 straight matches, the first five won while commuting from his home outside London, where he had decamped to a spare bedroom for the month to get some rest.

Then came his final Wimbledon tuneup, at Queen’s Club in London, where he lost his first match to Alex de Minaur of Australia, a top 20 player who took advantage of Murray’s heavy legs and lackluster serve that day. Murray tried not to read too much into the result.

All journeys have peaks and valleys. As the teachers in Murray’s hot yoga classes would say, the only way out is through — even on those days when the end feels closer than Murray hopes it might.

The latest turn of the college football-driven conference realignment carousel took me back to the Pleistocene Era of journalism, when I worked as a summer news desk clerk amid the telex machines, pneumatic tubes and desk drawers full of booze at the dearly departed Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

A sign on an editor’s desk caught my eye: “Deadline is a two-syllable word.” Succinct and sly, it mocked one of the newsroom’s most sacrosanct tenets: Don’t blow deadline.

But in the digital era of continuous publishing, the notion of a deadline — which melds two of Merriam-Webster’s more unequivocal words — has somehow become malleable, a transformation that brings me back to the recent maneuverings of San Diego State University.

If the school was going to leave the Mountain West Conference for the Pac-12 in a year, it faced an 11 p.m. P.T. deadline on Friday to notify the Mountain West. Otherwise, its exit fee would double to about $36 million.

The problem: San Diego State did not have an offer from the Pac-12 Conference.

The reason: The Pac-12 did not have a media rights deal. (More on that in a moment.)

As the hourglass emptied on Friday, the Pac-12 chancellors and presidents convened to receive another one of their regular updates on the media rights negotiations. Later, San Diego State informed the Mountain West that it would stay put. For now.

That this unfolded on June 30 was fitting.

Last year on that date, Southern California and U.C.L.A., the Pac-12’s football and basketball standard bearers, stunned the college athletics world by deciding to bolt for the Big Ten when the Pac-12’s television contract expires after the 2023-24 season.

This opened the door of opportunity for San Diego State, which has long pined for a move to the Pac-12 — a switch that would not only confer athletics legitimacy, but also put a California State University school on equal footing with Cal-Berkeley, a flagship school in the more prestigious University of California system.

It would require a three-step process. First, the Pac-12 would secure a media rights deal. Next, the 10 remaining members (the Pac-12 hoped) would sign a grant of rights, binding them to the conference for the duration of the media rights agreement. And finally, the conference would consider expansion.

Yet a year later, the Pac-12 is still in first gear.

The Pac-12, whose current agreement with ESPN and Fox expires after this season, found itself boxed out of several options when the Big 12 surprisingly locked in its media deal with Fox and ESPN last October, two months after the Big Ten announced its deal with Fox, CBS and NBC. The Southeastern Conference’s 10-year contract with ESPN kicks in next year, and the Atlantic Coast Conference’s deal with ESPN runs until 2036.

That leaves few openings on the broadcast schedule to showcase the Pac-12.

“The problem for the Pac-12 is all the other cards have now been dealt,” said Ed Desser, a sports media rights consultant, who noted that the only coveted spot would be Saturday night on ESPN or Friday night on ESPN, Fox, Apple or Amazon.

Negotiations have sputtered for several reasons.

First, the Pac-12 commissioner, George Kliavkoff, tried to convince the University of California Board of Regents last fall to keep U.C.L.A. from leaving, which would have given the conference the valuable Los Angeles media market to shop around. (In December, the governing board voted not to block the move.)

Also last fall, many media companies began slashing jobs nearly across the board, particularly at Disney, which owns ESPN and said it would shed 7,000 jobs as it dealt with the continuing impact of cord cutting. And while streaming platforms like Apple and Amazon might be attractive, those companies are unlikely to view sports programming (that is not the N.F.L.) as indispensable.

It quickly became apparent that the media industry’s belt-tightening would manifest itself in second-tier rights deals. Shortly after the Big 12’s deal, which was largely considered below-market at $31.7 million per school, the Pac-12 adjusted downward by 10 percent estimates of an agreement it could reach if U.C.L.A. remained.

Then came the delays.

Expectations of an agreement by the start of the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament led to hopes of a deal by the Final Four. And then by mid-April. And then surely by the start of summer. Now, the assumption is that an announcement will be made before the Pac-12’s football media day on July 21, so that the event’s dominant story line is actually football.

Of course, what is in the agreement will have consequences.

The Big 12, which added Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston on Saturday, and could lose Texas and Oklahoma this time next year, is interested in poaching any Pac-12 school that is unhappy enough to jump if the payout is significantly below what the Big 12 is receiving.

In that case, it would not take much — Colorado and Arizona leaving, perhaps, or Utah — for the Pac-12 to disintegrate.

These are the scenarios that San Diego State had to game out. The Aztecs, who came within one final push of winning a men’s basketball championship and who regularly exhibit a quietly competent football team, are in a familiar spot. They agreed in 2011 to jump to the Big East for football, while playing in the Big West for other sports. But two years later, that agreement collapsed and they remained in the Mountain West.

Last month, the San Diego State president, Adela de la Torre, wrote a letter to the Mountain West saying the school intended to leave and asking for more time. A flurry of back-and-forth letters ensued.

In the end, San Diego State determined that its conference exit may well be negotiable, as many before it have been. And so the school concluded that if a move to the Pac-12 were to happen, it would happen in time — deadlines be damned.

Darren Drozdov, a former N.F.L. football player who pursued a career in pro wrestling that was cut short after an accident in the ring that paralyzed him, died on Friday. He was 54.

His death, at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Pomona, N.J., was confirmed by his sister, Rommi Drozdov, and his agent and longtime friend, Cliff Stein. A cause of death was not immediately clear.

Before Drozdov made his mark in the wrestling world, he first came to the public’s attention as an N.FL. player after he vomited on a football at a Monday night game, Mr. Stein said. Some reports indicate that he puked more than once.

Drozdov grew up in Mays Landing, N.J., where he spent most of his adult life. He attended the University of Maryland, where he played football, and graduated in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

After graduation, he was signed as an undrafted rookie for the Denver Broncos. Drozdov, who was 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed 280 pounds when he played football, also had stints with the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles.

While he was playing for the Montreal Alouettes, a professional Canadian football team, he started to think about a career in pro wrestling, Mr. Stein said. It was something that had always been in the back of his mind.

“His personality was so colorful, and the mohawks and the tattoos and the way he talked, everyone would say, ‘You are a wrestler,’” Mr. Stein recalled. “He would call you ‘brother.’ He’d pick you up. His presence was so big.”

Drozdov, who was known as Droz and Puke, was eventually accepted to a WWE training program. After that, he was put into more matches. He became a member of the Road Warriors, a popular tag team, and became known for his “Droz’s World” vignettes, the WWE said.

Early in his career, he was in a WWE training program with other notable wrestlers like Matt Bloom, known as Prince Albert, and Dwayne Johnson, the actor known as the Rock, who mourned Drozdov’s death on Twitter.

“We wrestled on a lot of cards together,” he wrote. “Such an awesome dude. Great personality and great wrestling talent. We always talked about football and fishing. Sending love, strength, mana and light to his family. RIP brother.”

During a 1999 wrestling match at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., Drozdov sustained an injury that rendered him quadriplegic, bringing his wrestling career to an end.

He fractured two discs in his neck in a stunt gone wrong after he was thrown to the mat by his opponent, D’Lo Brown, and landed on his head instead of his back.

Darren Drozdov was born in Wilmington, Del., on April 7, 1969, the son of Olaf and Cyndi Drozdov. His mother worked in real estate and owned three laundromats, and his father was a professor at Atlantic Cape Community College in New Jersey.

Survivors include his parents and his sister. A marriage in 1999 ended in divorce in 2001.

Drozdov’s sister helped care for him after he was injured. He spent much of his time cheering on her four children, she said.

“He loved watching them grow up,” Ms. Drozdov said. “He would go to all the soccer games, football, tennis, everything. You could always find him on a sideline that my kids are on.”

He also continued to hunt, one of many outdoor sports he enjoyed.

Kevin Plank, Drozdov’s friend and the founder of the sportswear company Under Armour, facilitated the design of a wheelchair that was essentially a “tank with wheels,” allowing Drozdov to move through the woods, Mr. Stein said.

Drozdov’s family members described him as being relentlessly positive in the aftermath of the wrestling accident.

In a statement, they cited his own words.

“There is always another day,” he said. “Just because I’m paralyzed and stuck in a wheelchair doesn’t mean my life is over. I’ve learned to live again, and my life is far from over.”