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.