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Growing up poor on the South Side of Chicago, Quincy Black learned to adapt. If the water was too cold for a shower, he'd warm it up in the coffee pot. • "You have to be able to shimmy through (problems). You've got to squeeze through it. You've got to adapt," the Bucs linebacker said. "That's how I grew up. • "You learn how to do stuff with a screwdriver and a butter knife. That's all the tools you had. You just have to know how not to get caught up in the negative. Focus on the positive things that surround you. Make those as important to you as possible." • Standing at his locker one day last week, Black tugged down hard on the bill of his baseball cap until it reached his eyebrows, squared his shoulders and stared straight ahead.
If you spend some time with Black, you might be left with the impression he's wound tighter than a rusted lug nut and about as serious as a drill sergeant.
"He's very slow to trust, and sometimes, it hurts him," Bucs coach Raheem Morris said of Black.
Then again, how much of your heart would you be willing to give if the three people you loved the most died before you were 21, including both parents, who died before Black graduated high school?
"He was just devoted to doing the right thing, no matter what cards he was dealt in life," Black's agent, Harold Lewis, said.
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At 6 feet 2, 240 pounds, Black is one of the biggest linebackers in club history with a mountain range of muscles carved through rigorous weightlifting sessions.
"Pound for pound, he's one of our strongest players," strength coach Kurtis Schultz said of the third-round pick out of New Mexico in 2007. "He's definitely a freak in the weight room. It's nothing for him to put 700 or 800 pounds on a leg press and do it six or seven times."
Black's rare athletic ability, strong enough to rush the passer from a three-point stance but quick enough to cover shifty running backs, prompted the team to re-sign him to a five-year, $29 million contract ($11.5 million guaranteed) in August.
But a closer examination of Black's life makes it obvious why he might have a tendency to stiff-arm strangers — and even some teammates.
Black played football and basketball at Chicago's Kenwood High, located near the Illinois Central Railroad. Singer R. Kelly once attended the school. It does not have a regulation-sized football field, forcing the team to play home games elsewhere.
Black lived with his mother, Doris Lorraine, and her father, Booker Smith. He had an older brother by five years, Elliot, and an older sister by eight, D.D. His dad, James Frank Black, was seduced by drugs that were readily available on his street.
"You either sold them or used them," Black said without a tone of judgment.
By his freshman year of high school, Black's father died of a heart attack at age 44.
An all-public league linebacker, Black had one scholarship offer, from Hinds Community College in Mississippi. He accepted, in part, because his grandfather was from the state. (He wound up not playing football while concentrating on academics.)
"I thought I had some family down there," Black said, "but that didn't work out the way I planned it."
In May 2002, two weeks before he graduated from Kenwood, Black's mother, who battled weight and stress issues, died of a heart attack. She also was 44.
"There was a point when I was in Mississippi and I was ready to kind of give it up, really," Black said. "I was miserable. My brother (Elliot) told me to stay in school, and it was like, 'Damn!' I look back now and how far I've come, and it's crazy. Without him, I wouldn't be here.
"When you're in a whirlwind, it's hard to get an idea of who's there for you because you're just bumping off so many people. You don't know if they're pushing you or if your momentum is just taking you and you're pushing them. (Elliot) was the one constant that when I said, 'This is (messed) up,' he was the one who — bam! — pointed me in the right direction."
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After a year, Black left Hinds and enrolled closer to home at Harper College in Palatine, Ill., a northwest suburb of Chicago. Staying with his grandfather, he woke up at 5 a.m., caught two trains, went through two-a-days and commuted back to the city at night.
His grandfather Booker Smith, a Navy vet who never finished high school, used to say he was "the captain of this ship."
One day, Smith ordered Black to leave his home and fend for himself, in effect, rendering him homeless. Black convinced a teammate who had just signed a lease on a one-bedroom apartment to let him sleep on the couch.
"(My grandfather) pretty much said, 'Get off my couch and make a living on your own,' " Black said. "I was going to school, but he didn't understand that."
Black had a great season at Harper, recording 88 tackles, leading them to a junior college national title and earning a scholarship at New Mexico. But shortly after beginning his career with the Lobos, his grandfather died.
"What I've been through is tough. But you have to feel in your heart you're doing the right thing," Black said.
"You have to believe in yourself and surround yourself with the type of people that are not necessarily going to hurt you because there's always going to be people who will doubt you."
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