On Sunday, August 7, 2005, the Kansas City Royals lost to Oakland, 11-0. Later that night, Ryan Lefebvre, the team's 34-year-old television and radio announcer, crouched in his closet, tears running down his face.
Lefebvre was gripped by depression and anxiety, not the tedium of having to watch a Royals team that lost 106 games. In The Shame of Me: One Man's Journey to Depression and Back (Ascend Books, 241 pages, $22.95), Lefebrve describes the emotional debilitation he experienced during the 2005 season. On a road trip to Cleveland, the broadcaster sat in a darkened hotel room, a bottle of Xanax on the bedside table, and considered how he could walk out of the Marriott and get to a hospital without being spotted by anyone in the Royals' traveling party. (He ended up going to the park and calling the game.)
The Shame of Me is a brave book told by a sincere, even admirable man. (Lefebrve worked with former Kansas City Star sportswriter Jeffrey Flanagan.) But it's not without flaws. The narrative frequently loses steam, and by book's end, Lefebvre sounds too much like the one of the platitude-reliant life coaches he seeks out as he reconstitutes his mental health.
Lefebvre presents an unlikely face of mental illness. He's a "young, handsome ex-ballplayer who liked to skateboard, lift weights and go to Mass in his spare time," as former Royals slugger Mike Sweeney writes in the forward. But in the book's opening pages, Lefebvre surmises that "he had been battling depression my whole life."
Lefebvre grew up in southern California, the son of carefree parents who separated when he was a toddler. His father, Jim Lefebvre, is a former Major League infielder who became a manager when his playing days ended. Lefebvre lived with his dad in the summertime. In one of the book's most poignant passages, Lefebvre describes an occasion when his father suggested that he sleep in the locker room at the ballpark because it would be easier on his new family.
The Shame of Me is most compelling when Lefebvre is recounting his struggle to keep things together during the 2005 season, when his depressive tendencies shaped into a thundercloud. Dinner and a show with Sweeney and others in New York City leave Lefebvre feeling as if his chest is about to explode. After the closet incident, he seeks out a therapist. But he fears the sessions and Lexapro prescription will be too late to save him. "Instead of going down as a great baseball announcer, my name would be linked to the seemingly healthy, happy young adult who had lost his mind," Lefebvre writes.
Slowly, with the help of talk therapy, rebalanced brain chemistry and quality time with Mom, Lefebvre begins to put himself back together. He visits Rome. He goes to Jamaica to spend time with a priest he considers a "spiritual guru."
Lefebvre does not depict the priest with much detail, other than to note that he's a "5'6" African-American." It's a problem throughout the book. Characters come and go without the reader learning much about them. Lefebvre himself loses dimensions at times. The book devotes roughly the same amount of space to the movie Good Will Hunting as it does to the 1990s, a decade in which Lefebvre played college baseball, gave up drinking a couple of times and began his broadcasting career.
The book's final chapters lack the power that Lefebvre is able to instill in earlier sections. Once the narrator makes it out of the weeds, the reader gets hit with self-help acronyms and a comparison between a balanced life and a well-watered lawn. ("When all of the sprinkler heads are functioning, the lawn flourishes.")
Still, it's easy to root for Lefebvre, who is now married and will begin his 12th season with the Royals next spring. A lot of people interested in bettering themselves talk about volunteering; Lefebvre actually goes to John Knox Village and makes friends with a 93-year-old former school principal. His service to others is just one example of his determination to break the despair.
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