Calling All Sports Fans

Are you a fantasy baseball nut who finds your loyalties divided between your fantasy team and your real team? Are you a Mets fan who “owns” Chipper Jones, a Yankee fan with Curt Schilling on the roster? Maybe you are one of the millions who hate Duke Basketball.

Tonight offers a chance to learn more about both subjects as Dan Shanoff of ESPN.com's Daily Quickie launches a new reading series “Varsity Letters” devoted specifically to sports-writing. Shanoff is “hoping for better chemistry than Larry Brown and the Knicks.” Asked to set a tougher goal, Shanoff points out that, “New York is full of such great sports fans and such a passionate reading-series culture, I was surprised combining the two hadn't been done earlier, but thrilled to try to make it happen."

Tonight’s speakers will be Sam Walker and Will Blythe. Walker, a Wall Street Journal columnist, will read from "Fantasyland," a chronicle of his year trying to compete at the highest level of Rotisserie baseball. Blythe, the former literary editor at Esquire, will read from "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever," which explores his parallel tracks of love and loathing as a sports fan, through the internal conflict he experiences as both a fan of North Carolina basketball and enemy of rival Duke.

Varsity Letters is tonight at 8pm (doors open at 7:30) Happy Ending 302 Broome Street (between Forsyth and Eldridge.) Admission is free.