Sam Goodwin
Episode 376
20 APR 2026
He played hockey growing up and then went on to not only play junior hockey in Dallas for the Texas Tornado, but from there earned a D1 athletic scholarship to Niagara University. During his freshman year at Niagara, he and two teammates set an NCAA record and made number 2 on SportsCenter’s Top 10 when they scored three shorthanded goals on one penalty, in 69 seconds. He still today plays in a weekly men’s league hockey game. He is the author of the best-selling memoir, “Saving Sam,” about his having been taken hostage and wrongfully imprisoned while in Syria, as part of his travels to every country in the world – all 193 United Nations Sovereign States, having attended Mass in 65 countries and visited Catholic churches in approximately 115. Listen as he mentions having even coached hockey in North Korea!
Notable guest quotes:
“I’m so grateful to my parents for instilling a strong Catholic faith into my four younger siblings and I. We went to Catholic school our entire life. My brothers and I attended a Jesuit high school.”
“I was fortunate to have some success with hockey … and was able to earn an athletic scholarship to Niagara University … and it’s a Vincentian university, so, St. Vincent de Paul.”
“It’s interesting, when I reflect back on my … hockey career today, some of those teammates are still some of the people who I’m closest with in my life today. I think that kind of being rooted in Catholicism is probably at least partly an explanation for that.”
“(I) always just tried to be humble and just kind of stick with the plan and stay moving forward.”
“My hockey career really came to an end primarily because I had some pretty bad concussion injury and I had post-concussion syndrome for almost a year and kind of brought things to an end in a way that, at the time, I didn’t like but turned out to be a blessing in disguise for a range of reasons.”
“The next place I was going to travel to was Syria. And just two hours after arriving, I was walking through a roundabout on the way to meet up with my guide when all of a sudden, a black pickup truck roughly pulled up next to me, two armed men jumped out of the back seat and instructed me to get inside… they accused me of espionage of being an American spy… They went on to hold me for nine weeks.”
“Everything had been taken from me; my material possessions, my communication, my freedom. But no matter what, I knew that my faith was absolute and that’s what I had to hold on to when everything else was taken.”
“Faith isn’t always easy, but it is always available no matter what.”
“I did end up completing the travel journey on December 31st, 2019, and actually my final country was the nation that is home to more Catholics than any other in the world. It was Brazil.”
“My travel journey… hockey was a big part of that. I played a lot of hockey overseas in Asia, which I never could have expected. I spent a week coaching the North Korean national hockey team.”
“God will use ordinary people to do extraordinary things.”
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