Yes It’s True: Does it have to be the superstar vs. the team?

Like so many other sports fans, I have been impressed with the exploits of WNBA star hipster Caitlin Clark and her impact on women’s basketball.

Before she came along, it appeared that the WNBA was just a marginal professional association that may not even continue to be in business in the near future.

Clark has generated a great deal of interest in women’s basketball, which until recently had taken a red-headed stepchild’s back seat to men’s hoops. She and her colleagues have been able to just about fill the stands that in bygone years were virtually empty.

But there is a down side to this wonderful development: The age-old battle between the individual and the team, a fight that virtually all coaches side with the latter. It was so pronounced that one of the most famous locker room speeches was University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler’s insistence on “the team, the team, the team.” And don’t forget, “There is no I in team.”

Perhaps long forgotten is the legendary John Wooden’s comment: “In a game of one-on-one basketball, I’ll take Pete Maravich. In a game of five-on-five, you take Pete Maravich.”

Coaches have to fight long-standing battles against their players’ dreams of individual glory instead of the welfare of the team. One of the most famous examples was the Wilt Chamberlain, who one year set virtually every individual professional basketball record in one season (1962-63, but was widely regarded as a loser because he didn’t lead any team to a championship.

In fact, many observers maintained that Chamberlain fell far short of Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, who was a member of a championship outfit in nine of his 11 seasons in the NBA, but didn’t have anything close to Chamberlain’s individual statistics.

Then in 1971, Wilt became a member of the Los Angeles Lakers and started to play a lot like Russell, focusing more on rebounding and assists, and the Lakers went on a record tear of 33 consecutive wins. Wilt had become a winner rather than a great player on a losing team.

All of this reminds me that my brethren in the media love to focus on the individual stars rather than teams. That’s what’s happening with Clark and the Indiana Fever.

In bygones days, there was a lot of attention the media paid to Tiger Woods in golf, Tom Brady in pro football, Wayne Gretzky in hockey, Barry Bonds in baseball and even Nancy Lopez in women’s golf. Broadcast and print media has always seemed to care lot more about individual superstars than teams. It’s like celebrity journalism.

It spills over into American politics, with the media following Donald Trump around and we can’t forget the “rock star” status that Barack Obama picked up more than a decade ago.

Closer to home, I acknowledge that I struggled not to sing the praises too often of Presley Hudson, Sydney Urban and Mallory Teunissen.

But I understand coaches having misgivings about the attention their superstars get as opposed to meeting team goals. It’s like the divergent approaches to politics — Do we appreciate people working together for a common cause, like a team, or do we overdo our attention on single individuals for leadership?

I wish all the best to Clark, and for that matter, her team and the WNBA. But I feel guilty focusing so much attention on one individual who’s supposed to lead us to the promised land.