A.J. Smith, general manager of the San Diego Chargers, played high school football for Bishop Hendricken High School.

San Diego Union-Tribune / Sean M. Haffey

A.J. Smith stood outside the Chargers locker room in the RCA Dome in Indianapolis last Sunday while, out on the field, the San Diego players celebrated their upset victory over the defending Super Bowl champion Colts.

Those were his players out there, players he had drafted, traded for, signed as free agents. The coaching staff was his, too, one he’d assembled after firing the previous head coach in a highly controversial move that had been widely questioned and criticized, especially after the Chargers, who were 14-2 in 2006, lost three of their first four games this season.

But they’d just won in Indianapolis and now, for the first time since 1994 — which also happened to be the last time the Chargers had won a playoff game prior to this season — they were going to be playing for the conference championship.

They were going to New England, to face the undefeated Patriots, a team making a powerful case to be considered the best of all time.

And Smith, who grew up in Cranston, would be going home.

What could be better for a man whose success story is one of the NFL’s all-time best — the story of a hard-working, highly intelligent, very gutsy guy who went from playing high school football at Bishop Hendricken to teaching gym classes at Bridgham Middle School, in Providence, to driving all over New England on his own dime, scouting small-college players, to becoming general manager of the Chargers and one of the most respected personnel experts in the National Football League?

“As the game was winding down,” Smith said, “I was thinking about going home.

“I don’t go out on the sidelines. That’s not my style. So I was watching the last few minutes of the game on a television in a hallway outside our locker room and it hit me like a ton of bricks: ‘If this goes down, I get to go home. It’s the Patriots. It’s New England. It’s home.’

“I was thinking of all the people there — my mother, my uncles, my cousins, my nieces and nephews, all of my wife’s family, my old high school coach, Emo DiNitto.”

It was more than 40 years ago that Smith played wide receiver for DiNitto and the Hendricken Hawks, but the two always have stayed in close touch.

“I wanted to be like him,” Smith said. “I wanted to be phys ed teacher and a high school coach.”

And that’s what Smith was in 1977, when he landed his first NFL job as a part-time, unpaid, area scout for the New York Giants.

“A.J. was captain of the team in 1966,” recalled DiNitto, who’s now supervisor of athletics for the Warwick public schools. “That tells you a lot. The other kids held him in high esteem.

“He wasn’t big. He was a 6-footer, about 180 pounds. He had good ability, and great hands. He was a hard worker and a great competitor.

“I remember that the night before we played Cranston East in a crucial game his senior year, he had all the kids bring sleeping bags to his house and stay over so nobody would stay out late. His mother cooked breakfast for all of them the next morning.

“He was a committed kid. If he set his sights on something, he’d do it.”

But whoever could have foreseen, when Smith was teaching at Bridgham Middle School and working as an assistant football coach at Cranston West, that he’d someday be general manager of one of the NFL’s best teams?

His is a story that makes Horatio Alger seem like an underachiever.

“The thing I have great pride in,” he said, “is that I started at the bottom.”

Smith, who this month signed an $11 million contract extension with the Chargers, earned $3.50 an hour when he started working as a film-grader and part-time scout for the Patriots in 1978.

He had gone to college at Kentucky Wesleyan, but didn’t play football there because he’d had to quit during his senior year at Hendricken after suffering a couple of concussions. He did, however, play three years of semi-pro ball after college, with the Attleboro Kings.

“I had a burning desire in my gut to play,” Smith said.

That desire burned out after he underwent his third knee operation.

But he still loved the game, and so, in 1977 he volunteered his services to the New York Giants, as an unpaid scout. He drove all over New England that fall, paying his own expenses, spending Saturday afternoons in places like Orono, Maine, and New Haven, Conn., watching Yankee Conference games, Ivy League games, going wherever he was assigned and filing reports on any prospects he saw.

That led to a paying job — if you want to call earning $3.50 an hour getting paid — the following year with the Patriots.

In New York, Smith had reported to Jim Trimble, who had been Patriots general manager Bucko Kilroy’s coach with the Philadelphia Eagles. Kilroy, who passed away last year, had been an all-pro lineman as a player, but it was as a personnel expert that he became best known.

“He was the guru of player personnel,” Smith said.

Trimble recommended Smith to Kilroy, and that was all Bucko needed to bring A.J. on board.

“That’s when it really all began for me,” Smith said. “I fell in love with scouting. I dove into it with both feet.”

When the United States Football League started in 1982, Smith did some scouting for the Chicago Blitz. That’s where he made the contacts that eventually landed him in the NFL.

The director of scouting for the Blitz was John Butler. The coach was Marv Levy. When the USFL folded after the ’85 season, Butler joined the San Diego Chargers and offered Smith a full-time job.

In retrospect, the decision to quit teaching to go into pro football seems like a no-brainer. But it wasn’t easy at the time.

Smith had tenure in the Providence school system. He and his wife, Susan, had two young children, Andrea and Kyle. Susan, like A.J., had grown up in Rhode Island. Now they were talking about taking a new job, all the way across the country.

“I was walking away from guaranteed security,” Smith recalled, “to take a precarious position. I didn’t know if I would — or could — succeed.

“But I wanted the challenge. I love the game so much. I wanted to be part of it. Susan was very supportive. We packed up the moving van and off we went.”

He’s never looked back.

When Levy became coach of the Buffalo Bills midway through the 1986 season, he brought in Butler as director of college scouting. Smith came along, too.

It was in Buffalo that Smith made his reputation.

He helped assemble four straight AFC championship teams (1990 through 1993), first as assistant director of college scouting, then, in 1993, as director of pro personnel.

It was on his recommendation that the Bills brought Doug Flutie back to the NFL from the Canadian Football League.

A charismatic Heisman Trophy winner at Boston College, Flutie had bounced from the USFL, to the Chicago Bears, then to the Patriots, where he spent three seasons, mostly as a backup to Tony Eason and Steve Grogan.

From New England, Flutie went to Canada, where he played eight seasons and won three championships. But his success in the CFL didn’t impress anyone in the NFL. Except Smith, who signed him in 1998, when Flutie rejuvenated a struggling Bills team and took it to the playoffs two years in a row.

“When Doug went to play north of the border,” Smith recalled, “it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ He was short. He was old. He had supposedly failed in the NFL.

“People didn’t have the nerve to go in and present his case to their general manager. They figured nobody else wanted him, so they took the safe road.”

That’s a road Smith has never traveled.

Among the reasons he has been successful is that he isn’t afraid to fail.

“People who are afraid to fail,” he says, “are the ones who are sure to fail. If you believe in something — go for it. Even if you have confidence in your ability, but are unwilling to cross the line because you’re thinking: ‘What if this doesn’t work?’ then you’re going down a negative path.

“I don’t think that way. If you’re going to win a championship, you’ve got to be aggressive.”

It’s that approach that has the Chargers playing for the AFC championship this afternoon in Foxboro.

Smith returned to San Diego, along with Butler, in 2001, after Butler had contract issues with the Bills.

They came to the worst team in the league. The Chargers were at the bottom of the NFL barrel, having finished 1-15 the year before. As a result, they had the first pick in the 2001 draft, the prize of which was considered to be a strong-armed, exceptionally athletic quarterback named Michael Vick.

Instead of drafting him, Smith and Butler traded the rights to the top pick to Atlanta.

“We would have looked like idiots,” said Smith, “if the deal hadn’t worked out. We would have been the guys who had the opportunity to pull the trigger on Michael Vick, but messed up.”

As it turned out, the Chargers looked brilliant.

The Falcons took Vick, who currently is serving a jail sentence for his involvement in a dog-fighting ring. The Chargers wound up with not only LaDainian Tomlinson, who in 2006 set an NFL record by scoring 31 touchdowns, but also landed a quarterback, Drew Brees, who started four seasons in San Diego, leading the team to a division title in 2004.

Earlier that year, Smith, who succeeded Butler as general manager in San Diego after his mentor died of cancer in April 2003, made another draft day deal that brought the Chargers their current quarterback.

Once again, the Chargers had the first pick in the draft in the spring of 2004. And, again, it was a quarterback — Eli Manning — who was considered the cream of the crop.

The problem was that Manning — whose brother, Peyton, was an established star with the Indianapolis Colts, and whose father, Archie, had been a collegiate legend at University of Mississippi and played 15 years in the NFL — made it plain he would not sign with San Diego.

“They humiliated the organization,” said Smith, whose dislike for the Manning family is still apparent. “I think it was their opinion that we weren’t going anywhere and that I was in over my head as a general manager.”

Here’s how “over his head” Smith was: On draft day, he picked Manning anyway, only to turn around and trade him to the New York Giants for draft picks the Chargers used to obtain quarterback Philip Rivers, along with kicker Nate Kaeding and, in 2005, linebacker Shawne Merriman, who made the Pro Bowl that season as a rookie.

With Rivers at QB, Tomlinson running for records, and Merriman leading a stalwart defense, the Chargers went 14-2 in 2006. But they were upset in the AFC semifinals on their home field by the Patriots, which led to Smith convincing team president Dean Spanos to fire coach Marty Schottenheimer.

It was a highly controversial move because, under Schottenheimer, the Chargers had won the division title twice in three years. But they’d also lost their opening game in the playoffs at home both times, and Smith was convinced Schottenheimer wasn’t the man to lead San Diego to a Super Bowl.

“Marty’s views and my views on how to win a championship were galaxies apart,” Smith said.

What really upset Schottenheimer’s supporters, and raised the eyebrows of even loyal Chargers fans, was whom Smith hired — Norv Turner, who had a career record of 49-59-1 in nine years as a head coach with the Redskins and Raiders.

“I know some people think [Turner] is a loser,” Smith said in September, when the Chargers stumbled to a 1-3 start. “I think the opposite. I look deeper than just a won-lost record. I think Norv’s a very bright guy who makes the proper decisions at tough times in the game.”

Come playoff time, Schottenheimer had struggled. He lost seven straight postseason games, dating back to when he was coaching Kansas City in 1992.

“We want to win enough games this year to go to the ‘tournament,’ ” Smith said earlier this season. “I don’t care if we have to go on the road and play in a parking lot. I believe that, with the head coach we have now, we have a chance to win it all.”

After beating Tennessee at home in the wild-card playoff game, the Chargers, who won their last six regular-season games, went on the road last weekend and upset the Colts in the RCA Dome. Now, they’re coming to New England.

And Smith is coming home, having built a team that has gone from the NFL basement to within

jdonalds@projo.com