They call Paul Coll ‘Superman’.
He is New Zealand’s top squash player, ranked number 13 in the world and rising fast. Why ‘Superman’? Just watch the clip on YouTube of him at the 2016 Canary Wharf Squash Classic winning a rally against Englishman James Willstrop (currently ranked 6th in the world)... As the commentators say, ‘out of this world’.
He’s a Greymouth boy, Paul. Uncle Tony captained the New Zealand Kiwis at the 1977 Rugby League World Cup. “We’re a competitive family,” Paul says. “Christmas dinner at our place, there’d always be some challenge on—like who could hold up the weights with outstretched arms the longest. Or planking. Whatever it was, the aunties and everyone would be in.”
Like so many other top athletes, Paul played lots of sports as a kid: rugby league (of course), hockey, basketball, soccer…and squash, like his Dad. But he wasn’t always ‘Superman’. “When I was playing Juniors, there were usually three or four guys better than me. It wasn’t until I was picked for the New Zealand team that I decided to figure out how to get better at it.”
The answer was something else he learned from his family: hard work. There’s skill involved in squash, of course, but when two more or less equally skilled players compete, more often than not fitness, strength and flexibility make the difference. “I’m fanatical about training,” says Paul, “I train three times a day. Went to university to study it. I’m always trying to find what’s most uncomfortable and doing more of that.”
“What goes hand-in-hand with hard work is discipline. You’ve got to be prepared to to make sacrifices. Not partying; eating well and so on. Living away from home is hard, but it’s a choice I had to make: initially to Christchurch and more recently to Europe because this is where the competition is and the coach I wanted to work with is based here.”
And within all of that is the problem with the ‘Superman’ nickname. It’s not that Superman is fictional, it’s that Superman’s extraordinary capabilities derive from his coming to Earth from the planet Krypton: superhero Superman always was superhuman. And the thing that annoys superhero Paul Coll the most is someone being described as having ‘real talent’. “They’ll talk about someone and say they had ‘real potential’…that they ‘could have been’ a top sports person. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. The thing that separates talent from success is hard work. If you’re not willing to do the work, then talent won’t take you anywhere.”
Which brings us to back to the question, how does one become a superhero: in squash, in any other sport, or in life? The answer, according to Superman himself (the real fictional one, as opposed to the real squash player one) is that there is a superhero in all of us. All it takes is the courage to put on the cape.