At home with Bucs legend Shelton Quarles

For any Bucs fan, One Buc Place – the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ training center – carries a slightly surreal feeling. The front door, adorned by a massive, three story glass football, seems designed to intimidate, to humble. Its hulking, stately presence says to everyone walking in the door: This is a place that’s bigger than you. This is where legends live. 

Beneath that football is a statue entitled “Moment of Victory.” It depicts the moment in Super Bowl XXXVI that Tampa Bay knew. Knew that the Buccaneers would go on to win the game; knew that the Lombardi Trophy was coming to Tampa Bay; knew that the era of the lowly, pathetic “Yucks” had been banished forever. That was the last day Tampa Bay was a sports backwater. Since 2002, its teams have been to eight championships and won four – as many as New York City, a region with six times the population and 10 teams to Tampa Bay’s three. 

Each of that year’s Pro Bowlers feature in the statue – iconic figures of the Super Bowl team and the history they represent. Prominently posed are Gruden, Sapp, Brooks and Lynch. And standing in the back, grinning happily, the man whose ultimate impact on the franchise rivals, if not surpasses, them all: Shelton Quarles, Number 53.

For Quarles, standing next to the iconic statue, same wide grin as all those years ago, One Buc Place is more than just a training facility – it’s home. Still athletic at 53, Quarles first walked through a very different set of doors at just 26. Having gone undrafted out of Vanderbilt and coming off a two year stint in the CFL, the Bucs recognized his talent and gave him a shot. 

Twenty-seven years later, he’s never left.

Quarles holds the record for the longest play in Bucs history with a 98-yard interception return for a touchdown against the Green Bay Packers in 2001. Photo: Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Earning his way

The years were not without changes – and challenges. The modern One Buc Place is a facility any modern team would display with pride (some commentators nicknamed it “One Buc Palace” for its opulence). But it opened only in 2006, just a year before Quarles himself moved from the gridiron to the back office. The previous structure was nicknamed the Woodshed – and was an equally unappealing place to be taken.

“It was bad,” Quarles told the Catalyst with a typical smile. “There were rats, there were cats, and the rats would just look at you like, ‘Sup?’” 

In the years prior to Quarles’s arrival, the answer would have been, “Not much.” 

When the the Glazer family took over Bucs ownership from the estate of Hugh Culverhouse, the team was a famously snakebitten franchise The first question was whether the Bucs would stay in Tampa at all; Tampa Stadium, the “Old Sombrero,” had long since shown its age, and the Woodshed was in worse condition still. Though a deal with the city and a bond issue would quickly put the issue to rest, it would be years before the new stadium and practice facility would be realized – bad news for the players. 

The training building was so small, “We ate in the locker room, we slept in the locker room, we had meetings in the locker room,” Quarles recalled. “Even the owners were in a trailer.”

The tide was slow to shift on the field, too. Future heroes Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks and Mike Alstott had all arrived with the Glazers, as had future Hall of Fame Head Coach Tony Dungy, but his first season was 6-10, a decline from 1995. More help was needed.

Into that breach stepped Quarles, trading the rouges of the CFL for the new pewter and red of the Bucs. He’s the first to emphasize the impact of the rest of the team, Sapp and Brooks and Alstott, fellow 1997 arrivals Warrick Dunn and Ronde Barber, the coaches, the owners, the executives, the staff, the trainers and announcers and doctors and janitors and everyone who kept the lights on every day. As he told stories about his playing days, his own name was almost always the last out of his mouth. 

But his own effect was unmistakable. As an NFL rookie he turned being an undrafted player from the CFL into an advantage. The lack of expectations gave him time to learn, especially from team stalwart Hardy Nickerson, and his speed and work ethic won the admiration of coaches and teammates. 

When he finally became a starter two years later, Quarles was ubiquitous, playing defense, playing special teams, playing everywhere; flying around the field, making tackles, pitching in on every play. In 2001 he had what still holds the joint record for the longest play in team history, a 98 yard pick-six on a peak-of-his-powers Brett Favre. An oversized photo of Quarles, stiff-arming a hopelessly overmatched Green Bay player, adorns the wall outside the press room to this day.

The next season the defense was called to contribute more points and more impact by new head coach Jon Gruden, so Quarles added two more interceptions, another touchdown, and more than doubled his tackles from the previous year. He’d put up more than 100 combined tackles every year since, and was one of only three Bucs players to record both a touchdown and a safety in their careers. He still ranks fifth in tackles amongst Buc players. A decade later, ESPN would declare him Tampa Bay’s greatest undrafted player.

Back to the front office

The end of that career in 2006 prompted only a brief hiatus before Quarles was brought back by the Bucs as a scout. When the new training facility finally opened shortly after, Quarles was one of the living reminders of its link to the past. 

But even then he had doubters to overcome. Coaches and executives worried he was too quiet, too empathetic, or too friendly; that he would identify with players too much to make the hard decisions required of an NFL executive. He would be the first to admit that that remains the biggest obstacle he’s had to overcome. “It’s hard to see guys leave when you’ve known them,” he admits. “You hate to see guys go that you like. But you can’t let that hinge on your decisions.”

Quarles’s quietness and empathy may have been mistaken for weakness or lack of ambition before, but no longer. Eighteen years on, Quarles is veteran of three different general managers and now on his eighth head coach as a player and executive. He’s been promoted from scout to Director of Pro Scouting and now to Director of Football Operations. 

He’s the man players lean on for almost every aspect of their lives before and during their time at One Buc Place. He helps them get to and from training camp from all over the country and the world; he helps train them, coach them and guide them; books travel to and from games; finds and assesses talent; brings in free agents; serves as the primary communicator with the league; and makes sure players get paid in full and on time – and, occasionally, ensures they actually cash the checks. When asked by the Catalyst to list his responsibilities, his answer was so long it was suggested that it would be easier to identify what he didn’t do. 

Despite his doubters, he’s also the man who delivers much of the players’ news – good and bad. “When we draft, the Head Coach is the first one to call, the GM is the second, and I’m third,” says Quarles. “When we cut, I’m the person who gets to call them up.

“It’s easier coming from me – coming from someone who played the game.” 

It’s also easier, surely, coming from someone who wasn’t a highly-touted draft pick with a guarantee of a big contract, a glittering future, a name in lights. If there’s a source to Quarles’s empathy and his seen-it-all-before bearing, that may be it. When a top 10% college player is an easy cut in the pros, and a top 1% player is on the roster bubble, Quarles is a reminder that it’s possible, living proof that the dream can come true. 

Quarles’ Super Bowl rings. Photo by Peter Wahlberg.

More diamonds

Outside the glittering new workout room, outside a door leading to the newly-resodded practice field, stood a notably older, more careworn exercise bike. When asked about it, Quarles said, “That bike out there? You don’t touch it. It’s mine.” He looks at it with the care and affection one does with a beloved old thing, one you’ve taken all over the world and had for the highest highs and lowest lows. The bike lives outside and somehow, in between his other work, Quarles visits the bike two hours every morning and night, clad in three layers of clothing despite the sweltering Florida heat. He says he likes the outside – and some days that may be the only time he gets there.

It’s that discipline that sets Quarles apart. He is often in the office at 2 or 3 a.m. and stays late into the evening. When he spoke to this reporter, most other executives were on their last vacations of the year, seizing the last chance of a respite before the arrival of players (July 22) and the breakneck pace of training camp and the season to follow. Quarles remained at the facility to mind the store.

It’s clear from talking to Quarles that he sees the players, the team and the whole organization as his family. It’s unsurprising, considering that Bucs were among the first family Quarles knew. “My dad passed away when I was really young, so I didn’t really have a memory of him,” Quarles explains. Years later, Quarles developed a relationship with an uncle who told Quarles, to his surprise, that teammate Warren Sapp was also his cousin. 

Quarles has been a devoted father and community figure himself, speaking with obvious pride about his three children – two sons and a daughter, who followed in his footsteps and joined the Chicago Bears organization. He does charity work and served for a time as Chairman of TBARTA, the governing body for Tampa Bay’s regional transit. It is that superhuman discipline that helps him fit together what would take most people two or three lives to do.

The symbols of that discipline, and the success it carried to him, exist in the holy grail of NFL life – Quarles’s Super Bowl rings. The version Quarles won as an executive for the 2020 season is notably larger and more opulent than the 2002 version he won as a player. As he tells it, the ring’s design gets input by the team’s captains, which in 2021 included two time Super Bowl champion Jason Pierre-Paul. Pierre-Paul felt the first several designs were not grand enough. 

Each time one came back, Pierre-Paul demanded, “More diamonds.”

Quarles smiles, regarding the rings carefully as tells the story. He looks at the rings as he does his old exercise bike – symbols not just of how far he has come but of the miles he has yet to travel. After his years of success in the place he’s called home – in the home he helped build – few would be surprised to see many more diamonds in his future.