Twenty-four hours in the life of Phallon Tullis-Joyce: From League Cup final to feeding Komodo dragons
· Yahoo Sports
Phallon Tullis-Joyce is squirting deer blood into the dirt.
“Blood and water,” the Manchester United and United States women’s national team goalkeeper clarifies to The Athletic. There are chunks in the mix, too, congealing among the leaf litter and dark, scarlet rivulets a la Jackson Pollock.
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“You know, I had a water bottle yesterday with the potential PKs (penalty kicks) for Chelsea (if the League Cup final had gone to a shootout). Then today, I have a water bottle full of blood from Muntjac deer.
“That’s a sick transition in, like, 24 hours.”
The 29-year-old means sick in the cool way, in the ‘Look, there’s Manchester United Women’s No 1 in Chester Zoo’s Komodo dragon lair, helping deliver the world’s largest living lizard her lunch’ way.
And it was cool. That was certainly the sentiment among the zoo-goers bottlenecking around the enclosure to catch a glimpse of Tullis-Joyce — wearing blue plastic hospital gloves, a cream United hoodie, dark-grey cargo trousers and gold hoop earrings as if in a special Vogue edition of National Geographic — on the other side of the glass.
It was cool that she was standing where they expected to find a four-foot-long venomous tube of scales, flicking its tongue ominously. Cool that she was squirting the red liquid in the myriad directions the accompanying zookeeper instructed. It was even cool when, a few minutes earlier, the carcass of a half-gutted Muntjac deer was lifted out of a black rubbish bag by said zookeeper, its entrails getting meticulously spread across various parts of the enclosure — a rock, a palm leaf, a different rock — until finally it was laid to rest beneath a bushel of straw and long grass for the lizard to, in a few minutes when she was released back into her home, find.
But it was even cooler as those unfamiliar with United head coach Marc Skinner’s team sheet discovered the identity of this mystery guest.
“That’s United’s goalkeeper,” whispered one teenage boy to another.
“No way.”
“Swear.”
“Huh.” A pause. “That’s a crazy side-quest.”
And of course, there are some jokes: This is United’s symbolic burial of their League Cup final hopes from the previous afternoon. Or their blood sacrifice to the Women’s Champions League gods before their quarter-final first leg at Old Trafford against Bayern Munich next Wednesday.
But such wisecracks are fleeting, particularly as Tullis-Joyce emerges from the enclosure to watch her masterwork in action: the Komodo’s eventual furry feast.
“That’s sick,” says the second boy. He, too, means cool.
Making wildlife, biology and conservation cool is Tullis-Joyce’s thing.
To scroll through the goalkeeper’s social media pages is to take a field trip around the Earth itself: there she can be seen diving off Spain’s Costa Brava in search of rejuvenated red coral, trekking in the Amazon rainforest researching stingless bees, gawking at a Barred Owl named Grandpa in Florida’s Okefenokee Swamp (Tullis-Joyce is a big swamps fan) or wearing a safari hat while regaling her followers about the enigma that is a Leaf Scorpionfish (“I’m a sucker for ambush reef predators whose ‘mohawk’ or algae-covered dorsal fin resembles a swaying, decaying leaf to gobble up unsuspecting prey!”).
Alongside these videos are others depicting her “other thing” — being a professional goalkeeper in the highest echelon of women’s football.
It’s tempting to view Tullis-Joyce as leading a double life. “When not diving on a soccer field, I find myself diving into the nearest body of water,” is the pithy catchphrase of her ambassadorship with environmental organisation 11th Hour Racing.
Only this implies a division — by day, snorkel-masked eco warrior; by night, the Women’s Super League’s reigning co-Golden Glove winner (the award for the goalkeeper who keeps most clean sheets in the competition in a season).
“I always get asked: ‘If you weren’t a soccer player, what would you be?’,” she says. “I really do believe you can be so many things at the same time. I use both of them together. Marine biology keeps me sane for some of the darker moments in the soccer world.”
Monday presented this theory in action.
Following United’s 2-0 cup-final defeat by Chelsea at Ashton Gate, Tullis-Joyce made the four-hour trek home from Bristol late on Sunday evening.
Less than 10 hours later, she was fresh-eyed and standing in front of a room of primary-school students, in the first of her three school sessions on Monday, spiritedly fielding questions about her ideal next destination (the Galapagos Islands to “trace the path of Charles Darwin”), if she’s ever seen a polar bear (yes, actually, when she visited Svalbard, Norway’s most northerly community) or which animal most scares her (“I probably wouldn’t go near a polar bear, or maybe an alligator. But you don’t have to be afraid. Once you learn more about something you become less afraid of them.”).
The balance can seem exhausting, physically — United have reached the last eight in their maiden Champions League campaign, transforming a high-intensity season of domestic and international football into one which often involves three-day turnarounds between matches — but also mentally. (At one point on Monday, Tullis-Joyce rattles off the names of four recovering coral families to one student, before naming a slew of wilderness parks and the various creatures within them without skipping a beat.)
“Sleep is hard. My brain is constantly going,” she says, which is a far less hyperbolic assessment when uttered in the breathless cantor that is Tullis-Joyce’s default speech speed. But the Earth is big. To be slow is to miss something.
Yet, in a culture that so often encourages a monofocus for young athletes or precocious intellects, Tullis-Joyce has long been an active dissident, something encouraged by her mother but nurtured by her own drive. When Tullis-Joyce was rejected by her local Olympic Development Program at age 12, she committed herself to “work, time and (sometimes) tears”, taking on training sessions that spanned the gamut of convention (trash-can dives and blindfolded tennis-ball catches) four times weekly, on top of the two-hour commutes to train at her local club.
In whatever minutes that existed in between, Tullis-Joyce was joining the National Ocean Sciences Bowl (a premier academic competition for high-school students in the United States, designed to stimulate interest in ocean sciences and related fields) branch at Longwood high school in New York City’s eastern suburbs, visiting local beaches, analysing horseshoe crabs, competing in buzzer quizzes all over Long Island and consuming documentaries by English primatologist Jane Goodall and marine biologist and oceanographer Sylvia Earle, early idols of Tullis-Joyce’s.
“It’s very much a thing in American athletics that they want you to have this persona, especially on the field as a goalkeeper,” she says. “They want you to be this barking goalkeeper (yelling instructions at team-mates durng games), but I do like to have a bit of compassion on the field. That’s what I try to be: as compassionate on the field as I am off the field, especially with any wildlife around me, too.
“I think of my brain as a little, sticky sponge. Any type of really cool fact, I try to stick onto my brain because I know how important it is to tell the students that when it does feel a little abysmal and dim, like, no, actually, this has happened just when it was doing this. And the students, you don’t know what backgrounds they come from, so I’m just trying to give as much as I can. I’ve been afforded so much that I have to keep giving.”
The desire to give back has driven Tullis-Joyce to apply her passion for wildlife and conservation beyond her own boundaries.
To attend the University of Miami in Florida, where she played in goal for their team (she still ranks in the top five of Miami’s history for saves and shutouts across her 62 appearances) while pursuing a degree in marine biology, Tullis-Joyce was one of 118 students to receive the prestigious National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Hollings Scholarship, along with the school’s full-tuition Ronald Hammond Scholarship. Under the latter’s conditions, Tullis-Joyce was required to perform community service while studying (and playing top-flight women’s college soccer).
For Tullis-Joyce, the clause was its own vocation.
“The outreach has always been a part of me,” she says. “It’s like, when you’re given something, you then have to offer something — that’s a big part of how I feel as a professional athlete. I’ve met so many great professors, teachers and coaches that I want to give back what I’ve been given.”
Upon arriving in the red half of Manchester in September 2023 from Seattle Reign, where she spent any free hours diving off the nearest coast, Tullis-Joyce immediately sought opportunities for outreach. United’s foundation scratched that itch, as its Eco Reds initiative — launched that year to build on the club’s environmental sustainability strategy — quickly became her passion project.
It was Tullis-Joyce, according to those involved, who pushed the foundation to be more involved with local schools, going into classrooms and educating primary, secondary and college-level students about marine biology, ecology and conservation. “It was humble beginnings,” Tullis-Joyce laughs, recalling the days of fashioning cuttlefish out of clay and pipecleaners.
Three years later, her commitment and passion have helped garner funding from donors to support multiple schools in having in-person conservation workshops or attending education sessions at Chester Zoo, like those The Athletic witnessed on Monday.
Being within Tullis-Joyce’s orbit for just an afternoon, it’s easy to see how this funding has amassed.
We live in a world increasingly plagued by headlines of diverting ocean currents and increasing planet temperatures, of images of black clouds billowing into evening skies. Football’s carbon footprint sits approximately at around 65million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), according to a new study for Scientists for Global Responsibility and the New Weather Institute. According to world-leading extinction expert Stuart Pimm of Duke University in the States, humans are driving species to extinction at around 1,000 times the natural rate.
At which point, the seductive option is to question the efficacy of spending the next three minutes removing the plastic film from a meal-deal egg-and-cress sandwich before placing the cardboard carton in the correct recycling bin.
Tullis-Joyce is familiar with this existential spiral.
“But we can also see in the research that’s been done in marine-protected areas that protecting even the smallest animal can have such an instant impact in rebounding these populations,” she says, and her voice is notable not for its petition but for its effervescence, its unabashed faith.
“It’s why I come to these,” she adds. “To show how resilient Mother Nature is, how resilient we are as humans. It’s so reflective of what can be done. That’s what I balance on. These marine-protected areas have shown that they’ve been able to recover species, and programmes like the Chester Zoo and the Black Rhino Project — they said they were extinct in the past, and now they’ve been able to release five in Rwanda! It’s absolutely mind-blowing.”
She pauses, then smiles.
“If you focus on your corner of the world, I do think each of us can make a big difference. I truly believe that.”
To her left, a student from her last session of the day (held in Chester Zoo’s jaguar exhibit) shouts a belated “Yanited!” as the class make their way out. Tullis-Joyce smiles.
Just as quickly, she is asked for another selfie. She agrees.
First, though, she points to the jaguar behind the glass and reels off a glut of facts about them.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
US Women's national team, Manchester United, Women's Soccer
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