On this episode of Our American Stories, growing up across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Richard Herzog found refuge from a troubled home on the playing field. Sports gave him confidence and a place to belong. Then a trusted teacher abused that trust, leaving Herzog with wounds he would spend decades trying to understand.

Herzog, author of Paydirt, shares how football eventually brought him to Ole Miss and later to a championship-winning career as a coach. But no victory could erase his past. Through therapy, recovery, faith, and forgiveness, Herzog finally confronted what had happened to him and found a new purpose: helping other male survivors of sexual abuse understand that what happened to them does not have to define the rest of their lives.

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