Big Easy Lofton gets his nickname from growing up in New Orleans and his easy-going nature, which helped him and teammate Flight Time Lang to a top-four finish during Season 15 of “The Amazing Race.”
The popular pair is getting another shot at the top spot, as Big Easy and Flight Time are competing in a special season of the Emmy Award-winning series, “The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business”.
Big Easy has also appeared on other popular TV shows such as “The Price is Right,” “The Bonnie Hunt Show,” and “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” He and Flight Time also walked the red carpet at, and appeared on, the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards.Despite his nickname, nothing was easy about what Big Easy and 13 family members and friends went through when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 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, they were able to make it out of the city and evacuate to Houston.
As luck would have it, it was in Houston where Big Easy was discovered by the Globetrotters’ scouting department. “One of the most difficult times in my life turned into an unbelievably positive twist of fate,” he says.
Big Easy, who still resides in his hometown, 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. During his two seasons, the Lions won consecutive conference titles and made their first ever NCAA tournament appearance in 2005.
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 so we could have a roof over our heads, 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.’
