MMA/Boxing

A Contestant On UFC’s The Ultimate Fighter Has A Gay Porn Past

The Ultimate Fighter is UFC’s reality show on FX, wherein a group of young up-and-coming fighters live and train together in Las Vegas with the hopes of landing a UFC contract. A few weeks before every season, UFC releases the names of the new cast members, and MMA fans pore over the list to see if they recognize any of the young fighters. Welp, one name on the list this year stood out. But it wasn’t for fighting.

As the Googling of the names by hardcore fight fans continued, and more information was dug up on each contestant, it was revealed that one of them — a guy named Dakota Cochrane — looked an awful lot like a gay porn star named ‘Danny.’ Message boards lit up, and blogs began their whole CSI side-by-side photo comparison routine (‘Danny’ and Dakota apparently share a similar tattoo). Soon it became clear that, yep, Dakota was ‘Danny.’

UFC and Cochrane eventually had to address the issue. Here’s Cochrane’s take on the decision he made when he was younger:

“It’s definitely a decision I regret,” he told MMA Fighting. “If I would have known what would happen I definitely wouldn’t have done it. But I had money issues and I needed help. I went there to do pictures, and they started throwing pretty high numbers in front of me. I didn’t really think. It was a big mistake.”

…

The 25-year-old Cochrane, who is not gay, says he earned around $80,000 overall from taping the videos, which he made while a college student at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, where he was an all-league track athlete as a pole vaulter and 4×100 meter relay runner…Finally, when he admitted to his girlfriend Lacey Sechtem what he was doing, she asked him to stop, and the short-lived career was over.

Cochrane was up front with his movie credits during his audition, so the UFC knew about it (and probably, on some level, knew that this info would come out). He apparently has a pretty good shot at winning this year’s competition, too, which will certainly make for some interesting TV as Ultimate Fighter rolls on (UFC probably knew this, too).

[Cage Doctors, Bloody Elbow]