This is the unusual story of the unlikely relationship between the families of Vineyard photographer Peter Simon, his rock ’n’ roll star sister, Carly, and baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson.
The tale begins in 1955, when the fleet-footed Mr. Robinson — the first African-American Major League baseball player in history — was leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first World Series title.
John Havlicek didn’t say much on the way back from Nantucket, but then you really have to have something important to say to holler over a diesel engine growling at 3,000 rpm.
It had been a long seven hours at sea for Mr. Havlicek, with the time spent bouncing around Nantucket Sound telescoped in a way only those who have been seasick can describe.
Bob Ryan calls it how he sees it. Hold the sugar. Give an audience the truth and nothing but the truth, plain and simple. At the end of the day, the voice of Boston sports wanted it no other way.
A group of retired athletes, academics, writers and social activists convened a forum on race and gender in sports here this week, and generally described a bleak landscape for the African American athlete in the 21st century.
The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, headed by Prof. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., staged its annual Vineyard forum Wednesday, this year entitled Between the Lines: Race and Gender in Sports in the 21st Century.
It is a game played by old men and young boys, by professionals and amateurs alike, at the dawn of spring and at the coming of winter. On the Vineyard, the game of baseball has been played by farmers, sailors, fishermen and businessmen, in Menemsha meadows and makeshift diamonds at Waban Park in Oak Bluffs, Toomey Field in Chilmark and Veterans Park in Tisbury.
Students in Elaine Weintraub’s Irish history class at the regional high school took their studies outside on Monday, trying their hand at one of the oldest sports in the world, the Gaelic game of hurling.
