WIMBLEDON —The last time I spoke to Henry Patten, he was No 42 in the world and hoping to boost that number by winning a couple of rounds at Wimbledon in the men’s doubles with Finnish partner Harri Heliovaara.
Now he is a grand slam champion, a top-20 player and has 325,000 reasons in his wallet to smile.
He is not even hungover, it seems, puncturing my hopes of hearing tales of post-title misbehaviour. Instead, he was joined by 50 or 60 of his nearest and dearest at Wimbledon before heading home before midnight.
“I couldn’t sleep and that wasn’t because I was out very late,” Patten tells i.
“We stayed probably at the [All England] club for a few hours till 11pm then went home, watched the replay of the tie-break at the end, and tried to go to sleep.
“I probably fell asleep at 3am and woke up at 8.30am.”
John McEnroe would be disappointed, but Patten still has plans. He has been fitted for his tuxedo on site at Wimbledon for the gala ball – the invite is a privilege afforded to finalists at the championships – although there was a moment of panic when he discovered they did not have shoes bigger than a size 12.
An Ipswich Town fan, he was assured that they would be showing the Euro 2024 final at the champions’ dinner, “otherwise I’d be in some pub in Wimbledon probably, along with the rest of the draw”. It may well have been a dealbreaker for another Wimbledon champion, Carlos Alcaraz of Spain – who, in the end, watched it on his phone and then an iPad en route to the event after his media commitments ran late.
There was also the slight complication that Patten had booked an early flight to the US on Monday, where he will finally get to spend some time in the apartment he has moved into with his girlfriend Ellie, a newly qualified doctor about to start a job at a hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Having earned himself a week off, he has no intention of missing that flight for a night out.
“We’ll go wherever the night takes us, but what I will say is we’ve both got morning flights out, Harri to Finland and me to America,” Patten says.
“We need to be on those, so whether we’ll get a decent night’s sleep or absolutely zero sleep is yet to be seen.”
The life of a professional tennis player tends to revolve around airports. Patten, now the British No 2 in doubles, has played in 20 different cities this year across 11 countries and on six continents. He does not have grand plans for the biggest pay cheque of his life, but the odd business class upgrade will definitely be tempting.
“I’ll take the trophy with me when I check in and see if they give me some leg room,” says Patten, who at 6ft 6in needs as much as he can get.
“I’m certainly not putting it in the hold!”
Patten does not seem like the type to turn into a diva though. Seven years ago, he worked at Wimbledon as a data inputter, plugging every point into a laptop for IBM. He never got on Centre Court though, because he wasn’t good enough.
He didn’t think he was good enough at tennis to play there either. He went to university in America and started doing summer internships in wealth management. A coach at Durham convinced him to study for a Masters in the north-East and play for the university team. He had teammates who had played on tour and “tagged along”, initially playing singles and doubles but then choosing to specialise two years ago.
There have been a variety of partners – he and compatriot Julian Cash broke a record in 2022 by winning 10 titles on the second-tier Challenger Tour – but he and Heliovaara are still relatively new, and have already won five titles together, including Wimbledon.
“He’s been honestly an amazing partner,” Patten explains. “I think we’ve been good partners to each other, to be honest.
“We just have similar values. We both trust that we are extremely competitive. Even in practices, we’re always competing against each other.
“But there’s also an understanding that off the court, there are also important things in our lives that shouldn’t be overlooked.
“In the past, maybe we’ve had partners that on court, we’ve got along great, but maybe those values haven’t been quite lined up, and actually, I think has made a massive difference for us.
“He keeps going on about a safe space, which is a good way of putting it. We both just feel comfortable and know that we are going to fight to the very end.”
Heliovaara has been travelling with his wife and children this summer, and their box and ticketed area on Saturday was packed with Patten’s parents, sister, two brothers, college teammates and friends, along with Louis Cayer, the brains behind the UK’s thriving doubles programme, and Patten’s coach Calvin Betton.
The tension of a final that consisted of three tie-breaks and Patten-Heliovaara saving three championship points was too much for most of them to bear. The whole match came down to, perhaps appropriately, a champions’ tie-break, first to 10 points.
“At the end, everyone else was going nuts,” Betton says.
“I thought Louis was going to have a heart attack. Everybody was just screaming and shouting, and I was just sat there.
“I just thought they needed to see that somebody was being calm. I don’t know whether it was even noticed but that’s what I thought it was my job to do.”
When they finally sealed the title after two hours and 52 minutes, no one was calm. Heliovaara was in tears, while Patten just repeatedly shouted “what?” at his friends and family. No one on Centre could quite believe what they had witnessed.
“It hasn’t sunk in,” Patten says, and means it. “I don’t really fully know what it means for me, and obviously for Calvin, for everyone that’s working with me on my tennis.
“We haven’t really figured it out at all. We’re just enjoying it.”
And so they should.