Position: Showman Date of Birth: 04/15/1981 Height: 6' 9" Weight: 250 lbs
College: Southeastern Louisiana University '05 Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Biography:
Globetrotters Showman Big Easy Lofton gets his nickname from growing up in New Orleans, and he hopes to make easy work of the challenges facing him and teammate Flight Time Lang during season 15 of the Emmy Award-winning series "The Amazing Race," Sundays on CBS.
The two face one of the fastest courses ever assembled on the Race - spanning eight countries in just 21 days.
Despite his nickname, nothing was easy about what Big Easy and 13 family members and friends experienced when Hurricane Katrina hit the city in August 2005. Most of the group lived in the uptown projects, and when the levees gave way, everyone was looking to Big Easy and his late father to pull everyone together. With his father at the wheel, Big Easy and two friends pushed the group in a pickup truck from the middle of the projects to near St. John the Baptist Church. From there, the group was able to make it out of the city and evacuate to Houston.
Since Katrina, Big Easy, who still resides in his hometown, has helped aid former NBA star Kenny Smith's annual Hurricane Katrina relief effort: "We Have Not Forgotten."
Big Easy was a two-time All-Southland Conference selection at Southeastern Louisiana, and as a senior, he led the team in blocks, steals, rebounds and assists.
His gregarious personality and thunderous dunks entertain Globetrotter fans young and old. He was 13 when he first dunked on an alley-oop...although he admits it was "kind of a baby dunk," but a dunk nonetheless.
Big Easy took many life lessons from his father. "He worked really hard each day and night for my family so we could have a roof over our head, food in our stomachs and clothes on our backs," says Big Easy. "Sometimes I did not see him for days, because he would leave at four in the morning and come back at eleven at night from work; all because he did not want my little brother and I to have to put in those kinds of hours later in life.
"Now that I'm a father, it's the best thing in the world when I walk through the door. My two girls just see daddy; they don't care what I have or don't have, it's just their daddy.
"The day my first daughter was born, my father told me, 'Work every day to feed your kids, put clothes on their backs and provide them with the finer things in life. Also spend as much time as you can with them.You don't get an award for any of that; it's what you do if you want to call yourself a father.'"
