Kuldeep Yadav was one of the seduced. He was a fast bowler.
He liked the wind in his hair and the power that came with hurling a rather painful leather projectile at the enemy. He wanted to be Wasim Akram.
The fascination is easy enough to understand, more so because Kuldeep was very young. Boys that age generally want to be bad, and there is little that fits the bill quite like a fast bowler raising hell on a cricket field. Michael Holding was called whispering death. Fred Spofforth was called the demon.
They really did not need those nicknames to raise chills in the back of people's spines.
The Kuldeep who made his Test debut as a 22-year old, though, was all grown up. His obsession with speed had long passed and he now ambled up to the crease, four or five steps at most. He had cried the first few times he had to go through this routine.
Returning to the cricket, Peter Handscomb, the Australian batsman, saw a man playing his first match, and a delivery that was well tossed up. He stepped forward, eager to flaunt his cover drive but there were a few things happening that he was not aware of. One, the ball had drifted in the air, lulling him into thinking it was ripe to be whacked. Two... actually that's it. That's all it took to induce a false shot and shatter middle and off stump.
If you imagine the game as a Looney Tunes cartoon - all of us should - a fast bowler's dream scalp resembles an anvil dropping down on the batsman. It is graphic, but straightforward. A spinner's is the tripwire that the villain falls over, face-first, straight into a pile of muck. It is unexpected and hilarious.
With the Border-Gavaskar series on the line, and barely a few hours into his Test career, Kuldeep was making fools of the opposition. Taking it a step further, he credited one of their legendary players for his success.
"If you imagine the game as a Looney Tunes cartoon, a fast bowler's dream scalp resembles an anvil dropping down on the batsman. A spinner's is the tripwire that the villain falls over, face-first, straight into a pile of muck. It is unexpected and hilarious."
"Did you see the first wicket," he said, "That wasn't a chinaman. It was the flipper which I learnt from Shane Warne."
The past year has been kind to Kuldeep. Or maybe it was just his mates at Uttar Pradesh, who made sure not to score more than his 466 runs or pick up more than 35 wickets in the Ranji Trophy. He played in every first-class match his team did, and that is because he made 10 times the runs and took three times the wickets from the previous season. This after he was kept out of the XI because one of his coaches thought he was overweight. The boy had come of age.
In March 2017, the captain Virat Kohli and the coach Anil Kumble backed Kuldeep to play the deciding Test of the series against Australia. When he walked out on the field in Dharamsala, he did so as the first left-arm wristspinner to represent India in the five-day format.
His maiden wicket was David Warner, who tried playing back in order to give himself more time to read the turn off the pitch, and never saw the fuller one coming. It was a fine piece of deception, worthy of his running up to the nearest rooftop and yelling about it. But, since he could not quite do that, he told a room full of journalists.
Australia had been 144 for 1 at one time, on a pitch that bore great similarities to the one in Perth - hard, quick and bouncy. They should have felt at home. Instead they lost nine wickets for 156 runs. Kuldeep, the mystery bowler, the x-factor player, finished with 4 for 68.
But the thing is, with cricket and technology being like Tom and Jerry, you never see one without the other, international sides will not be sucker-punched too often. Analysts spoiled by an exhaustive amount of footage might discover tells in his bowling action and pass it along. They won't allow him to perform the same trick twice.
If not that, then Kuldeep might come upon a set of batsmen better suited to handle his variations. It has already happened in franchise T20. He was sprung on Perth Scorchers in 2014 and they were about as comfortable as a teenager having to explain their browser history to Mum and Dad. Come the day of the final, he was smashed for 44 runs in four overs, with Suresh Raina, who must have faced him a million times in the nets at UP, leading the charge.
Shrinking formats, growing bat sizes, tiny boundaries and flat pitches can make a bowler feel naked in front of the entire world. The only thing that can save their vanity is not so much skill, fours and sixes off the outside edge still go up on the board, but the ability to adapt.
R Ashwin, the second quickest to 200 Test wickets, recently said a part of his preparation is looking six months into the future. He does that to make sure he does not become obsolete. Hundreds of hours at training and the millions of strategies on the drawing board all amount to little if a bowler can not think on his feet.
That is Kuldeep's next challenge, and it is not like he is ill-suited to it. In the IPL only days past, he was given the 18th over and had to bowl to MS Dhoni, the man who had hit him for six off a mere top edge in his previous over.
He should have been scared. But he took those four or five steps up to the crease, doled out a beautiful googly and stumped one of the most destructive finishers of all time. His contribution helped keep Rising Pune Supergiant to a total of 182 and the Kolkata Knight Riders batsmen went past it with 11 balls to spare. The kid who was told he could never be a tearaway had come a long, long way.
Kuldeep had been hurt by that assessment. It must have felt like the end of a dream, but sheer chance gave him a new one. He had taken to the game only to appease his father, and to pass the time, so while training the little quickie would sneak in the odd legbreak or two just for fun.
Having seen this, his academy coach Kapil Pandey told him to give up fast bowling. Kuldeep did, and because of that, because he was willing to listen, he is the press of a button away from the who's who of Indian cricket.