How old was former WEC champion Steve Cantwell when he grew his first cannabis plant? He wasn’t in college. He wasn’t in high school. Hell, he couldn’t even be called a teenager.
The retired knockout artist was just 12 when that first marijuana sapling found its way into his orbit. At the time, he didn’t even smoke. He simply fancied himself a gardener. While other neighborhood kids spent their days obsessing over video games and cartoons, Cantwell’s afternoons were spent instead scouring the landscape around his childhood home in Pahrump, Nev., forever on the hunt for any baby plants he could bring inside and adopt as his own. So that first pot plant? No different. One day he found it poking out from the earth near his front yard and scooped it up without any sense of what he was doing. Before long, he’d dutifully pieced together its secrets like a puzzle, unraveling the plant’s subtleties and seasonal blooms and when to expect flowering. After that? He was hooked. After that, a year didn’t go by without Cantwell’s teenage self having a cannabis plant around the house to call his own.
Even still, he never expected anything like this.
“I’m always going through old family pictures trying to find a pot plant in the background,” Cantwell joked with The Athletic. “I still have yet to find one, but I know they’re there.”
An ex-light heavyweight who fought six times for the UFC from 2008-2012 and once knocked the bejesus out of Brian Stann, Cantwell speaks from the middle of his 12,000 square foot compound in the heart of Pahrump, the same small town where he was once expelled from high school for fighting, and the same small town where his brainchild, Green Life Productions, now resides. Nearby, construction is well underway on a new 20,000 square foot, state-of-the-art greenhouse. Not far off sits a third property — 40,000 square feet — which Cantwell hopes to one day turn into GLP’s first full-blown cannabis dispensary. That’s the end game, or at least one of them. For now, he’s leasing half the building to a local Goodwill, just to help pay its mortgage.
Business is on hold at the moment, of course. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shut down cannabis operations all around North America. But if you’ve smoked in Las Vegas in the three years since Nevada legalized recreational weed, there’s a good chance you’ve sampled some of Cantwell’s work. As of this writing, GLP grows and ships anywhere from 140 to 500 pounds of cannabis every month, a number Cantwell expects to balloon to 1,000 pounds per month once construction is complete. And that’s just the smokeable product, the flower weight. Add in any trimmings or additional products that all contribute to GLP’s bottom line, and it’s a major operation — one that counts more than 40 employees, including UFC strawweight Emily Whitmire, who serves as a brand ambassador.
It’s all still a little surreal for Cantwell. At 33, the man they used to call the “The Robot” has emerged as one of MMA’s rare post-retirement success stories, the elusive athlete whose second act is far more lucrative than his first.
“I never prepared myself to open a business,” he said. “To run it. To have employees. To be a soil biologist. And I got kicked out of high school. I couldn’t even spell half the shit I say, you know? So it was challenging. I went from being a dumbass MMA fighter to sitting in rooms with Ph.D.s asking me questions, trying to get answers out of me. So it was completely different.
“You couldn’t have flipped the script any harder.”
When he decided to leave MMA in 2012, the game had taken everything from Cantwell. He was 25, dead broke and overrun with injuries. Multiple knee tears had left his mobility in tatters. His left shoulder had never recovered from an injury suffered before a UFC fight with Cyrille Diabate. Tendinitis issues rampaged throughout his body. All in all, he could barely tie his own shoes without something hurting. And his career had suffered.
Although others have since surpassed his numbers, when Cantwell walked away, he held the unfortunate distinction of owning one of the longest losing streaks in UFC history. By the time his five-fight skid came to a head at UFC 144, his mind and physical self was broken to the point where not only could Cantwell see the writing on the wall, he also was barely able to live a normal life.
“I was already completely broken, at my lowest of lows,” he said.
“I had this chronic pain just constantly building up. It wasn’t getting better. And then just mentally, just the depression of losing fight after fight after fight, injury after injury after injury. I didn’t have a whole lot of positive influences in my life at that time. My family was going through a lot of things, so it just wasn’t a good time for me.”
What does a 25-year-old with the body of a 50-year-old, whose entire life has been engineered around being a professional fighter and whose entire skillset has been rendered obsolete overnight, do after the finish line arrives a decade sooner than anticipated?
Cantwell had no idea. He just knew he needed to find some way to manage the daily pain that was holding him back. He also knew he didn’t want to resort to opiates as so many other fighters and professional athletes had in the past, often with dire consequences. So after abstaining from marijuana for most of his fighting career, Cantwell decided to attack his situation with a two-birds-with-one-stone Hail Mary attempt, helped by a gentle nudge from his wife, Kouanin.
“When I got off the plane from my last fight from Japan, my wife basically handed me an application to get my medical marijuana license,” Cantwell remembered. “I already knew I was going to go that route. Remember, I grew up as like a poor little ghetto kid growing up in trailer parks and shit. For me, I didn’t really have much hustles to look forward to. So to me, selling weed was a hustle — one of the few options I really had at the time. It was fighting and selling weed. That was all I really knew.”
As fate would have it, Cantwell’s decision proved to be a godsend. Almost instantly, his daily pain significantly lessened. And that old green thumb he had in his childhood?
Just like riding a bike, it never left.
Within a year of hanging up his four-ounce gloves, Cantwell found himself growing and selling marijuana out of his house full-time, rifling through roughly three pounds of product every two months, all while teaching himself the intricacies of hydroponics and coco coir and organic nutrients and everything else that weed enthusiasts rarely consider when they daydream about how sweet it’d be to make a living growing high-quality cannabis.
It was a crash course in weedonomics — and the former WEC light heavyweight champion proved to be a star student.
“It kind of sparked something in me,” Cantwell said. “I thought it was really cool. I thought I could help a lot of people going down that route. It was prior to the commercialization of it. It was only just still a medical and underground kind of thing, and I got really into it.”
Today, Cantwell’s passion project has bloomed into one of the most recognizable brands in Nevada’s booming cannabis scene. Once the state legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2017, Cantwell found a financial backer to support his ambitious plans — serendipitously, it was the same hardware store owner who’d signed on to be his first-ever MMA sponsor before his UFC days. And soon, Green Life Productions exploded into existence, expanding at a rapid rate with the help of a technique Cantwell says he popularized that involves growing cannabis within living organic soil — a technique that has since become one of the norms for the industry.
“It was really cool. I came here with no cash and built my dream team. I built every single thing in a facility I designed, and we kind of launched this new style of growing,” Cantwell said. “Five years ago, nobody was growing in raised beds, indoors, with living soil, under LEDs. Nobody. Now if you go on IG, those are like three of the trendiest things, is living soil, raised beds, LED light. So we’ve just been growing. We were one of the first ones in the state of Nevada to open up.
“(Because) we didn’t use pesticides and fungicides and all these crazy poisons, we didn’t have to wait for (Nevada) to release their allowable list of pesticides you can use. So while everybody else was built out at the same time as us, they were waiting for this list of pesticides to be released so they knew that they could spray the plant. Well, we didn’t have to wait because we didn’t use any. So we got about, I want to say a six- to eight-month jump on anybody in that Nevada market. And what we did with that, was we focused solely on our branding. We just branded, branded, branded. Hardcore push our brand, push our brand. GLP, Green Life Productions. And it stuck.”
Although he’s content with his choices now, Cantwell is the first person to admit that his journey was a scary one.
It wasn’t easy to leave behind MMA. Fighting was all Cantwell knew, and even after he retired, he was angry. Angry at the world, yes. But also angry with himself, at how things turned out. Accepting that his life as a professional fighter was over took an adjustment period. And in a way, he’s still going through it.
“I was raised to be a freakin’ fighting maniac, so I kind of had to put a cap on that,” Cantwell said. “Going to board meetings and having people disagree with you, and having an ability to smash everybody in the room — that was hard. It’s like, ‘Do I have to listen to these people? I could smash everybody. They have to listen to me.’ That kind of mentality, you know? But I had to get over that. And then getting more employees? Same thing. I’ve got to be patient dealing with employees. I can’t tell them to fucking put their pads on and meet me in the ring. So it was just a whole mental transition. I had to learn how to work with people.”
In order to start again, Cantwell knew he had to cleanse himself of his conflicted feelings toward the fight game. So he quit the sport cold turkey.
For years, anything that had to do with MMA — he tuned it out. He wouldn’t even allow himself to watch fight nights from the comfort of his own couch.
“I had to rebuild myself,” Cantwell said. “I had to, completely. I felt like I had a whole lot of fight left in me, but I had to put it toward something else and I couldn’t be distracted by MMA. So I just completely cut MMA out of my mind, out of my life, and just 110 percent focused on cannabis. So from 24 to 30-something years old, I didn’t watch any UFC. So there was some really big shit that went down that I completely missed. Like, I barely knew who Conor McGregor was until like two years ago, because I didn’t know what I was going to wake up (inside me). MMA was such a huge part of my life. At one point, it was all of my life. So I didn’t know what can of worms I was opening.”
Nowadays, Cantwell is back to being all-in. He watches as much of the sport as he can and barely ever misses a big event. After GLP became successful enough to soothe any lingering worries about his path, he allowed himself that mercy. He still hits the gym too, or at least does whenever he can. He wouldn’t mind competing again if the right opportunity arose, but it’s not something he’s focused on anymore.
Because the crazed soul who used to pay his bills by fighting monsters like Stann?
Cantwell doesn’t even recognize that person anymore.
“It’s weird because I’m able to think back to my old mindset, and it just trips me out how different my thinking was,” Cantwell said. “Back then to now, it’s not even just a physical difference — it’s just mentally, the difference, it just freaks me out.
“I was a fucking killing machine back then, dude. All I thought about was fucking smashing people. Honestly. Like, I think about that now — like, how I used to think — it’s like, damn. I was a scary motherfucker, dude. Like, I didn’t think about anything but fucking people up. That’s pretty scary. And there are dozens of people out there, or millions of people out there that are pursuing this same dream that are probably in that same mindset. So I’m definitely a lot nicer to people now.”
MMA hasn’t ever been a sport that prepares its athletes for what lies beyond. The lifestyle of a professional fighter is one so single-minded, so focused only on the next paycheck, it rarely ever affords its participants a chance to properly plan ahead. Cantwell was in that same boat: the fighter who didn’t consider the next stage of his life until his window was already slamming shut. But now he’s an outlier. The fighter who went on to achieve far greater heights on the other side.
And for that?
Hey, if anyone deserves a celebratory toke of that sticky icky in the middle of a pandemic, it’s “The Robot.”
“I’d say (to other fighters searching for what’s next), just face the world like you do every upcoming opponent,” Cantwell said. “Everything’s going to have its challenges. The things that we learned that we take with us — the hard work, dedication and perseverance — those things can all be applied no matter what we do. So just do what you love. Just continue to do what you love and to chase and pursue things that make you happy — and those usually lead to success. So that’s what I would say: Just hit it was confidence. Just approach the world like you would any fight.”
The retired knockout artist was just 12 when that first marijuana sapling found its way into his orbit. At the time, he didn’t even smoke. He simply fancied himself a gardener. While other neighborhood kids spent their days obsessing over video games and cartoons, Cantwell’s afternoons were spent instead scouring the landscape around his childhood home in Pahrump, Nev., forever on the hunt for any baby plants he could bring inside and adopt as his own. So that first pot plant? No different. One day he found it poking out from the earth near his front yard and scooped it up without any sense of what he was doing. Before long, he’d dutifully pieced together its secrets like a puzzle, unraveling the plant’s subtleties and seasonal blooms and when to expect flowering. After that? He was hooked. After that, a year didn’t go by without Cantwell’s teenage self having a cannabis plant around the house to call his own.
Even still, he never expected anything like this.
“I’m always going through old family pictures trying to find a pot plant in the background,” Cantwell joked with The Athletic. “I still have yet to find one, but I know they’re there.”
An ex-light heavyweight who fought six times for the UFC from 2008-2012 and once knocked the bejesus out of Brian Stann, Cantwell speaks from the middle of his 12,000 square foot compound in the heart of Pahrump, the same small town where he was once expelled from high school for fighting, and the same small town where his brainchild, Green Life Productions, now resides. Nearby, construction is well underway on a new 20,000 square foot, state-of-the-art greenhouse. Not far off sits a third property — 40,000 square feet — which Cantwell hopes to one day turn into GLP’s first full-blown cannabis dispensary. That’s the end game, or at least one of them. For now, he’s leasing half the building to a local Goodwill, just to help pay its mortgage.
Business is on hold at the moment, of course. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shut down cannabis operations all around North America. But if you’ve smoked in Las Vegas in the three years since Nevada legalized recreational weed, there’s a good chance you’ve sampled some of Cantwell’s work. As of this writing, GLP grows and ships anywhere from 140 to 500 pounds of cannabis every month, a number Cantwell expects to balloon to 1,000 pounds per month once construction is complete. And that’s just the smokeable product, the flower weight. Add in any trimmings or additional products that all contribute to GLP’s bottom line, and it’s a major operation — one that counts more than 40 employees, including UFC strawweight Emily Whitmire, who serves as a brand ambassador.
It’s all still a little surreal for Cantwell. At 33, the man they used to call the “The Robot” has emerged as one of MMA’s rare post-retirement success stories, the elusive athlete whose second act is far more lucrative than his first.
“I never prepared myself to open a business,” he said. “To run it. To have employees. To be a soil biologist. And I got kicked out of high school. I couldn’t even spell half the shit I say, you know? So it was challenging. I went from being a dumbass MMA fighter to sitting in rooms with Ph.D.s asking me questions, trying to get answers out of me. So it was completely different.
“You couldn’t have flipped the script any harder.”
When he decided to leave MMA in 2012, the game had taken everything from Cantwell. He was 25, dead broke and overrun with injuries. Multiple knee tears had left his mobility in tatters. His left shoulder had never recovered from an injury suffered before a UFC fight with Cyrille Diabate. Tendinitis issues rampaged throughout his body. All in all, he could barely tie his own shoes without something hurting. And his career had suffered.
Although others have since surpassed his numbers, when Cantwell walked away, he held the unfortunate distinction of owning one of the longest losing streaks in UFC history. By the time his five-fight skid came to a head at UFC 144, his mind and physical self was broken to the point where not only could Cantwell see the writing on the wall, he also was barely able to live a normal life.
“I was already completely broken, at my lowest of lows,” he said.
“I had this chronic pain just constantly building up. It wasn’t getting better. And then just mentally, just the depression of losing fight after fight after fight, injury after injury after injury. I didn’t have a whole lot of positive influences in my life at that time. My family was going through a lot of things, so it just wasn’t a good time for me.”
What does a 25-year-old with the body of a 50-year-old, whose entire life has been engineered around being a professional fighter and whose entire skillset has been rendered obsolete overnight, do after the finish line arrives a decade sooner than anticipated?
Cantwell had no idea. He just knew he needed to find some way to manage the daily pain that was holding him back. He also knew he didn’t want to resort to opiates as so many other fighters and professional athletes had in the past, often with dire consequences. So after abstaining from marijuana for most of his fighting career, Cantwell decided to attack his situation with a two-birds-with-one-stone Hail Mary attempt, helped by a gentle nudge from his wife, Kouanin.
“When I got off the plane from my last fight from Japan, my wife basically handed me an application to get my medical marijuana license,” Cantwell remembered. “I already knew I was going to go that route. Remember, I grew up as like a poor little ghetto kid growing up in trailer parks and shit. For me, I didn’t really have much hustles to look forward to. So to me, selling weed was a hustle — one of the few options I really had at the time. It was fighting and selling weed. That was all I really knew.”
As fate would have it, Cantwell’s decision proved to be a godsend. Almost instantly, his daily pain significantly lessened. And that old green thumb he had in his childhood?
Just like riding a bike, it never left.
Within a year of hanging up his four-ounce gloves, Cantwell found himself growing and selling marijuana out of his house full-time, rifling through roughly three pounds of product every two months, all while teaching himself the intricacies of hydroponics and coco coir and organic nutrients and everything else that weed enthusiasts rarely consider when they daydream about how sweet it’d be to make a living growing high-quality cannabis.
It was a crash course in weedonomics — and the former WEC light heavyweight champion proved to be a star student.
“It kind of sparked something in me,” Cantwell said. “I thought it was really cool. I thought I could help a lot of people going down that route. It was prior to the commercialization of it. It was only just still a medical and underground kind of thing, and I got really into it.”
Today, Cantwell’s passion project has bloomed into one of the most recognizable brands in Nevada’s booming cannabis scene. Once the state legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2017, Cantwell found a financial backer to support his ambitious plans — serendipitously, it was the same hardware store owner who’d signed on to be his first-ever MMA sponsor before his UFC days. And soon, Green Life Productions exploded into existence, expanding at a rapid rate with the help of a technique Cantwell says he popularized that involves growing cannabis within living organic soil — a technique that has since become one of the norms for the industry.
“It was really cool. I came here with no cash and built my dream team. I built every single thing in a facility I designed, and we kind of launched this new style of growing,” Cantwell said. “Five years ago, nobody was growing in raised beds, indoors, with living soil, under LEDs. Nobody. Now if you go on IG, those are like three of the trendiest things, is living soil, raised beds, LED light. So we’ve just been growing. We were one of the first ones in the state of Nevada to open up.
“(Because) we didn’t use pesticides and fungicides and all these crazy poisons, we didn’t have to wait for (Nevada) to release their allowable list of pesticides you can use. So while everybody else was built out at the same time as us, they were waiting for this list of pesticides to be released so they knew that they could spray the plant. Well, we didn’t have to wait because we didn’t use any. So we got about, I want to say a six- to eight-month jump on anybody in that Nevada market. And what we did with that, was we focused solely on our branding. We just branded, branded, branded. Hardcore push our brand, push our brand. GLP, Green Life Productions. And it stuck.”
Although he’s content with his choices now, Cantwell is the first person to admit that his journey was a scary one.
It wasn’t easy to leave behind MMA. Fighting was all Cantwell knew, and even after he retired, he was angry. Angry at the world, yes. But also angry with himself, at how things turned out. Accepting that his life as a professional fighter was over took an adjustment period. And in a way, he’s still going through it.
“I was raised to be a freakin’ fighting maniac, so I kind of had to put a cap on that,” Cantwell said. “Going to board meetings and having people disagree with you, and having an ability to smash everybody in the room — that was hard. It’s like, ‘Do I have to listen to these people? I could smash everybody. They have to listen to me.’ That kind of mentality, you know? But I had to get over that. And then getting more employees? Same thing. I’ve got to be patient dealing with employees. I can’t tell them to fucking put their pads on and meet me in the ring. So it was just a whole mental transition. I had to learn how to work with people.”
In order to start again, Cantwell knew he had to cleanse himself of his conflicted feelings toward the fight game. So he quit the sport cold turkey.
For years, anything that had to do with MMA — he tuned it out. He wouldn’t even allow himself to watch fight nights from the comfort of his own couch.
“I had to rebuild myself,” Cantwell said. “I had to, completely. I felt like I had a whole lot of fight left in me, but I had to put it toward something else and I couldn’t be distracted by MMA. So I just completely cut MMA out of my mind, out of my life, and just 110 percent focused on cannabis. So from 24 to 30-something years old, I didn’t watch any UFC. So there was some really big shit that went down that I completely missed. Like, I barely knew who Conor McGregor was until like two years ago, because I didn’t know what I was going to wake up (inside me). MMA was such a huge part of my life. At one point, it was all of my life. So I didn’t know what can of worms I was opening.”
Nowadays, Cantwell is back to being all-in. He watches as much of the sport as he can and barely ever misses a big event. After GLP became successful enough to soothe any lingering worries about his path, he allowed himself that mercy. He still hits the gym too, or at least does whenever he can. He wouldn’t mind competing again if the right opportunity arose, but it’s not something he’s focused on anymore.
Because the crazed soul who used to pay his bills by fighting monsters like Stann?
Cantwell doesn’t even recognize that person anymore.
“It’s weird because I’m able to think back to my old mindset, and it just trips me out how different my thinking was,” Cantwell said. “Back then to now, it’s not even just a physical difference — it’s just mentally, the difference, it just freaks me out.
“I was a fucking killing machine back then, dude. All I thought about was fucking smashing people. Honestly. Like, I think about that now — like, how I used to think — it’s like, damn. I was a scary motherfucker, dude. Like, I didn’t think about anything but fucking people up. That’s pretty scary. And there are dozens of people out there, or millions of people out there that are pursuing this same dream that are probably in that same mindset. So I’m definitely a lot nicer to people now.”
MMA hasn’t ever been a sport that prepares its athletes for what lies beyond. The lifestyle of a professional fighter is one so single-minded, so focused only on the next paycheck, it rarely ever affords its participants a chance to properly plan ahead. Cantwell was in that same boat: the fighter who didn’t consider the next stage of his life until his window was already slamming shut. But now he’s an outlier. The fighter who went on to achieve far greater heights on the other side.
And for that?
Hey, if anyone deserves a celebratory toke of that sticky icky in the middle of a pandemic, it’s “The Robot.”
“I’d say (to other fighters searching for what’s next), just face the world like you do every upcoming opponent,” Cantwell said. “Everything’s going to have its challenges. The things that we learned that we take with us — the hard work, dedication and perseverance — those things can all be applied no matter what we do. So just do what you love. Just continue to do what you love and to chase and pursue things that make you happy — and those usually lead to success. So that’s what I would say: Just hit it was confidence. Just approach the world like you would any fight.”
