He says he was the worst player in the history of Revere (Mass.) High School, goes by the nickname of Sweet Chuck, used to work for the Celtics, is short with a shaved head, and looks like he should have been an extra in the movie Mystic River.

So what was he doing helping Kobe Bryant the last 50 games of the season, e-mailing him tips on an almost daily basis on how Kobe could be even more effective?

Well, that’s the story.

A story right out of basketball’s subculture.

I first met him almost a decade ago, back when he used to periodically come into Fall River to work out Chris Herren, before I knew that his real name was Mike Procopio. We’ve been talking on the phone ever since, three or four times a week, causing people in the office to invariably ask, “Who is this Sweet Chuck guy anyway?”

Good question.

He was a “workout guy” then, the beginnings of what is now become almost a cottage industry.

So what if he only scored four points in his high school career?

He knew the game, he knew people in the game, and he could make players better. All in his own inimitable style, however politically incorrect it might be.

He calls smaller players “circus midgets.” Others are so bad “they couldn’t play dead in a cowboy movie.” Danny Ainge would ask him about a prospect and he’d say he was a “toe tagger,” an euphemism for dead in the water. He was funny, profane, irreverent, self-deprecating, often all in the same sentence.

Or as he e-mailed to Kobe one night, “You know you’re getting your information from someone who scored four varsity points and looks like Uncle Fester, right?”

He had begun as a “gofer” for the Boston Amateur Basketball Club, commonly known as BABC, the granddaddy of the AAU teams in New England, the one started and still run by Leo Papile, one of the all-time great cult basketball cult figures, and now the personnel director of the Celtics.

From the beginning he was always “Leo’s guy,” scoring the games, giving the players rides, helping out, whatever.

“The first guys I started working with were our BABC guys,” he says. “But working out Herren was great for me. Not only did I love him as a player, he was one of the first pros I worked out and he taught me a lot, about what was useful and what wasn’t. Like the day I put cones and trash barrels on the court to simulate opponents, and he said, ‘Sweet Chuck, if you don’t get rid of that stuff, I’m going to put the cone over your head, put you in the garbage can, and roll you back to Revere.’ ”

Soon, the word got out, and he started working with others: John Linehan, Kareem Shabazz and Marcus Douthit from PC. Guys from Boston College, UMass.

And he learned a valuable lesson in those early years: It doesn’t matter that you scored only four points in high school. Doesn’t matter what you look like, or what your basketball pedigree is. Players don’t care about that. They only care about one thing: can you make them better?

Or as Kobe told Yahoo! Sports last week: “To have someone as dedicated to the game as (Procopio), it was great for me. He could see things from the outside looking in that sometimes get a little cloudy when you’re in the moment of the battle. … All the time he would send me things I hadn’t thought about.”

Sweet Chuck worked for the Celtics for four years, primarily monitoring overseas players, but also doing everything from picking Ainge up at the airport to just being around. He was forever at local college games, both PC and URI. For the last several years he’s helped run the annual prep school tournament in URI’s Keaney Gym every February.

So how did this get him to Kobe?

Four years ago Procopio went to work at Attack Athletics, the showcase Chicago gym that’s become one of the epicenters of basketball culture. Roughly 70 NBA players and about 20 elite college players use it every summer.

It’s owned by Tim Grover, who once was Michael Jordan’s trainer, and this year spent much of the season as Kobe’s trainer, often following him around the league.

And it seems Kobe had been bothered by a New York Times magazine article about the way the Houston Rockets defended him. Had they really designed a better mousetrap? And if they had, what could he do about it?

So it began.

Bryant wanted Sweet Chuck, who had worked him out two years earlier, to watch tape and see what teams were doing to him. So Sweet Chuck began e-mailing him a post-game report, then the next day a scouting report of the next opponent.

Much of it was basketball esoterica: Where was their double team on him going to come from? How were opponents trying to defend him? Where should he expect his shots to come from? When should he be looking to attack, and when should he be looking to get his teammates more involved?

“Sometimes I’d get an e-mail from him at 2:30 in the morning,” he says, “and we’d go back and forth. There’s no one who works harder or is more prepared than Kobe, and he’s always questioning. Guys like that don’t want ‘yes men.’ They have enough of those guys around them.”

So do he and Kobe talk on the phone now that the season’s over?

“What am I going to do, Reynolds?” says Sweet Chuck dismissively. “Ask him to take me to Disneyland?”

breynold@projo.com