Mac the Knife

On February 20, Brendon McCullum was eating pizza and drinking beer in a hotel car park in Napier when his life changed forever. New Zealand's day had been quite breathless enough already - the fourth ODI against England had just finished as an incredible last-ball tie and the players were winding down ahead of their trip to Christchurch for the series showdown. But over in Mumbai, things were only just hotting up.

By the end of the night, the pizza and beer had become champagne and caviar. McCullum was looking forward to a lifetime of financial security, and had even allowed his thoughts to drift towards property empires and racehorses, after having been valued at US$700,000 in the inaugural IPL auction. "It was a huge moment for me," he told Cricinfo. "It's allowed me to change my life, and focus on getting the job done out in the middle rather than having to worry about the financial ins and outs. It's made things a lot easier."

McCullum hasn't exactly made the game look difficult of late, in what has proved to be a seminal six months. With the retirement of Adam Gilchrist, he has become not only the foremost wicketkeeper-batsman in the world, but arguably the single most devastating opener in all limited-overs cricket. He hammered a total of 261 runs from 203 balls to rout England over five matches in February (the one match in which he failed, New Zealand lost), while on New Year's Eve in Queenstown, he carved 80 not out from 28 balls to condemn Bangladesh to the most thumping defeat in ODI history, with ten wickets and 44 overs to spare.

No wonder the Kolkata Knight Riders paid through the nose for his services. On Friday night, McCullum had his first chance to offer a return on that investment, when he took on the Royal Challengers in the first round of the IPL. He did not come close to disappointing. In a feverish atmosphere at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, he strode out to open under the floodlights with his captain, Sourav Ganguly, and shone both literally and metaphorically, his brilliant unbeaten 158 from 73 balls amply justifying the garishness of his gold and black uniform.

Despite the hype, however, McCullum remains admirably phlegmatic about his new exalted status, and adamant that his best is yet to come. "The money is a nice reward for all the hard work and some of the success I've been getting," he says, "but hopefully my dollar value is more about my potential, not what I've offered so far."

Given that he won't turn 27 until September, McCullum's prime looks set to be protracted and fruitful. He combines a wonderful eye with a fearlessness born of self-certainty, and by making his first move a defiant stride forward, he puts himself in position to capitalise on the most minute error in line or length. "It's not rocket science," he says. "As long as you reset your stance it's all right, because it takes the risk out of your play. There's no harm in trying to be aggressive and showing good intent. Nine times out of ten, if you're asking the bowler to do something different, it probably means you'll have more success."

That bowler-baiting technique, however, has not come about without a fair degree of trial, error and soul-searching. McCullum's improbably low one-day average of 27.46, for instance, tells the tale of a difficult first foray in international cricket, which began in 2001-02 at the age of 20 - on a tour of Australia, of all places.

"I wasn't a roaring hit on debut," McCullum admits. He was run out for five in his first match against Australia in Sydney, and then made a third-ball duck nine days later in Adelaide. "It was a tough series, and a tough introduction, but I'd never change it, because it shaped me in terms of my desire and wanting to come back a better player." He nevertheless proved to be a lucky mascot. New Zealand won both games to hasten the end of Steve Waugh's ODI career, and McCullum was still a fixture - albeit an underperforming one - during New Zealand's World Cup campaign a year later.

"I had Cairnsy [Chris Cairns] and Flem [Stephen Fleming] saying, 'Actually, you don't understand, we don't beat these guys that often'," McCullum recalls. "I didn't do that well, but I'd had a taste and I knew this was what I wanted to be part of. We beat Australia twice and South Africa as well, so it was an enjoyable introduction, even if I didn't get the personal gains I'd have liked."

Those personal gains took a while to come to fruition - by the time he made his Test debut in March 2004, he had managed just two half-centuries in 35 ODIs, at an average of 20.03, and a strike-rate of 66, which hardly foretold the riches to come. But New Zealand's selectors recognised a star in the making and sent him to Australia in the winter of 2002, where he sharpened his game under the guidance of the former New Zealand coach, Steve Rixon.

"What I learned there was huge," he says. "I was a player with lots of expectations on me, so it really helped to grow my confidence and give a bit of that Aussie edge." On that trip, he also found time to break a few records for a Darwin club side, Palmerston, clobbering 250 not out in less than 100 balls in one remarkable performance. Transferring that sort of power-hitting to the highest level, however, was McCullum's real challenge.

"Domestic cricket in New Zealand isn't strong, so you actually have to find out your game in international cricket," he says. "For a while, I tried everything and took on board every bit of info, then I went the other way and decided not to listen to any advice. I didn't really know where I was heading. But it's a matter of balance and filtering the information that you get. You end up being surrounded by people who want to change your game, but most of the time it's what has actually got you to the side in the first place that needs to be harnessed."

To hear him talk and watch him play now, you'd assume he'd never had a care in the world. That's pretty much the impression he likes to create out in the middle. "I don't tend to get too concerned about the pressures of the game," he says. "You feel pressure every time you play, but you play with the expectation that you need to perform. If you fear not performing or you're worried about what's coming up behind you, your mindset is wrong. I look around the world, and ask myself, "What's Gilly [Gilchrist] doing, or [Kumar] Sangakkara or [Mark] Boucher? I try to move my game forward by taking strides to achieve what they are achieving."

So far as Gilchrist is concerned, McCullum is still a fair way short of matching his achievements, but time is very much on his side. At the same age, 26, Gilchrist had played two years of ODIs but was still 12 months away from ousting Ian Healy in the Test set-up. With more than 3000 international runs to his name already, as well as 250-plus dismissals, McCullum is quietly confident that he'll be leaving a significant mark on the game for posterity. "I've got a few numbers in mind, but I keep those close to my chest," he says. "Mostly they are records for New Zealand stuff, not internationals ... well, maybe they could be. We'll have to wait and see."

Rather like Buzz Aldrin to Gilchrist's Neil Armstrong, however, McCullum knows that he'll have to obliterate the record books if he is to be recalled in the same breath as his role model. "I'd love to match him, but I wouldn't want to disrespect him by saying that I will, because even if someone goes and does what he did, he was the first to do it. He went completely against the way everyone else has ever played the game, and he pulled it off. I'd love to do a fraction of what he's achieved.

"He's an absolute phenomenon and he's my inspiration," says McCullum. "Our techniques aren't that similar, but he gave me the confidence to try and match his intent and aggression. With him it was all about winning the game up front, rather than sitting back and waiting for this and that to unfold. When you go through a bad patch as an attacking player, people will try and say it's the wrong way to play, but he's been strong-minded enough to do it for a long period. He's one serious player."

McCullum is pretty serious himself. Unlike many of his wicketkeeping contemporaries, glovework comes naturally to him - so naturally, in fact, that he required an operation as a teenager after damaging his left knee while squatting for too many overs in park cricket. There is one significant area in which he still falls short of his idol, however, although Friday's innings might just be the catalyst for change. With 12 hundreds from No. 7 in Tests, and 16 more as a one-day opener, Gilchrist managed to produce innings that were sustained explosions. So far in his international career, McCullum has just two hundreds to his name, both in Tests against the minnows of Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.

His IPL debut follows on from a no-less-extraordinary 170 from 108 balls for Otago against Auckland in New Zealand's State Shield final last month, two innings that could herald the opening of the floodgates. "Flem always said hundreds are for poofs," McCullum joked during the recent England Test series, an opinion he might soon be forced to revise. "My conversion-rate does bother me a little bit, but saying that, hopefully I've got another ten years left in the game. With the lessons I've learnt, if I can keep going and keep learning, the numbers will look after themselves."

He's had a few near-misses in Test cricket - a 99 against Sri Lanka, and a 96 on his overseas debut, in 2004 against England, at Lord's of all places. The memory of that innings brings him out in a quiet rash of expletives. "That was pretty gutting," he says. "It was satisfying in a way, because we were up against a seriously good English attack at the time, but it was so disappointing. I got an opportunity to bat at No. 3, and we'd been behind on first innings, so I was proud, but I've got another shot coming up this year to get on the honours board."

First, though, he has his sojourn in India to be getting on with, and to judge by Friday's first impression, his dollar value will only be going in one direction in the coming months. "I just need to catch my breath at the moment," says McCullum. "I don't want to dive into every opportunity. I just need to digest everything that's happened, and wait until we get a sustained period of time at home before I work out what to do myself." To the casual onlooker, he's doing just fine as it is.