Let’s make this understood: Damon West was a good quarterback but can be a great person. He’s working on that every day. But between the QB glory as a boy in Port Arthur and the start of his reclaimed life as a man there’s been half a losing lifetime of struggle and sin. He knows that.

West, a former Thomas Jefferson High and University of North Texas standout, tells his story without varnish. He tells it to individuals and he tells it to group audiences, including sports teams and civic groups and wherever people will listen.

Ostensibly, it’s a story about dangerous drugs — it was crystal meth that undid his life — but on a deeper level, it’s a story about lost souls, bad belief systems and the hope of redemption.

If West had never touched crystal meth, he might have spared his parents and family and victims much pain. He might have led a pretty good life, with stockbroker pay and status and the pleasures money can bring.

Instead, his addiction to crystal meth took a promising young man into the mean streets of Dallas, where his participation in a notorious burglary gang led him to arrest, judgment, sentence and recovery. Never forget recovery.

West doesn’t forget recovery because it comes by the measuring spoon, not the barrelful. It comes with the daily struggle to leave a pernicious drug behind. It comes with certain knowledge that he’s hurt people in ways they might never forget, that he won’t forget. It comes with knowledge he can help others beyond what they might hope.

If you think West’s story is a football one, you’re dead wrong. It’s a human story, one that applies to quarterbacks and non-quarterbacks alike. It’s about looking demons in the face and staring them down. It takes courage and commitment.

This world is full of people who’ve failed in ways large and small. Some have committed grave sins; others committed smaller ones because they did not dare to commit larger ones.

But there are fewer stories of people who, after committing grave sins, have recovered their good hearts, not only to lead better lives but to lead worthy ones. For West, it meant not only changing himself, but helping to change others, helping them steer clear of downfalls.

At trial, he came to grips with the evil he’d created. In prison, he pondered a better way, even inside a 10-by-10 cell. There, he learned he could control what he thought, what he said, what he felt, what he did. Absent the drug, atop God’s shoulders, he could choose a better path. So can others, no matter their weakness.

It took West long years to make the right choice. But without pain, what is redemption?