Henry Patten and Harri Heliovaara have won Wimbledon and managed to concuss each other in their first six months as a doubles team, and now a deep US Open run is their goal.
Concussion injuries happen frequently in contact sports such as rugby and football, but it is certainly not the case in tennis.
Yet such a blow is exactly what Britain’s Patten and Finland’s Heliovaara suffered when they clashed heads in a men’s doubles match in Montreal last month.
Despite the injury, the pair are back in action and bidding for more Grand Slam success in New York, where they have already won through two rounds without dropping a set.
“It was unusual and now we can just about see the funny side of it,” Patten told BBC Sport, as he reflected on the banging of heads.
He added, jokingly: “One of the reasons I play tennis is because it’s not a contact sport, I’m soft.”
Patten and Heliovaara were 4-2 ahead in a first-set tie-break against American Ben Shelton and Kazakhstan’s Alexander Bublik in Montreal when the accident that left them sidelined for a few days took place.
“We were feeling pretty good until Ben Shelton put up, to be honest, not a very good lob and it was somehow straight down the middle of us,” Patten said.
“Somehow we perfectly smacked head to head which left us both with a mild concussion, which was a first for both of us and doesn’t happen very much in tennis.”
They played on for another 15 minutes, losing the tie-break before deciding to call it a day and retire from the match.
“I immediately felt quite nauseous, and balance was a little bit off balance,” Patten said.
Finland’s Heliovaara added: “After 15 minutes or so you could feel this was not a good thing that happened. It took me more than a week to feel close to normal and almost two weeks to be sure I’m finally back to 100%.”
Patten and Heliovaara, who only joined forces in April, are the third seeds at this fortnight’s US Open, but they were unseeded when they won a thrilling Wimbledon final in July.
They will face 11th seeds Wesley Koolhof of the Netherlands and Croatia’s Nikola Mektic in the third round on Sunday.
