“Staying at the fucking Hyatt at 41 years old?” LeBron James, the Los Angeles Lakers star and one of the greatest NBA players of all time, told a group of YouTube golf influencers earlier this month. “You think I wanna do that shit? Being in Memphis on a fucking random-ass Thursday? I’m not the first guy to even talk about it in the NBA. We’re all like, ‘You guys have to move. Just go over to Nashville.’”

It’s true, in part. Memphis has gotten a bum rap from hoops stars of late. In February, Anthony Edwards complained about a hotel with “stains and shit” on the beds. Draymond Green said he once had to leave a hotel because the “sprinklers just went off for no reason.” But James went beyond a critique of amenities. He was calling for the NBA to leave a city.

Athletes say and do a lot of things that cause people to yell and fight. But the controversy around James’s comments about Memphis has broken beyond the confines of sports talk-show banter. TV news reporters camped out outside the Grizzlies arena and invited exiting fans to defend their city on-camera. Stephen A. Smith — not exactly a paragon of righteousness — ranted on his podcast that James had gone too far. The Commercial Appeal, Memphis’s daily newspaper, is still publishing op-eds about James’s remarks, two weeks later, on the eve of the NBA playoffs.

There are logistical reasons for this long half-life. The Grizzlies planned to renew their lease to play at FedExForum last summer, but that didn’t happen, and while stakeholders remain bullish, renegotiations are ongoing. The franchise has already relocated once, from Vancouver. And with talk of the league expanding to new markets — like Las Vegas and Seattle (which has already lost an NBA team) — player and owner concerns about disorder in Memphis loom large.

But beyond these, and the offense taken by Memphians, James’s words reflect a broader pivot. Pro athletes have retreated from politics. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the economic woes of a Black city might have inspired........

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