Culture
Post-retirement, Carli Lloyd has things to say: 'People only saw me with raging, bulging eyes'
Carli Lloyd, the two-time World Cup winner and double Olympic gold medallist, recently wrote an article for Women’s Health magazine. She spoke movingly of her secret journey of unexplained infertility and IVF treatment, culminating in a joyous development: she is now pregnant, and expecting her first child in October.
Post-retirement and now aged 41, Lloyd wrote that her “heart has come alive” and explained how, for the first time, she feels able to open up and allow herself to be vulnerable.
This is not Carli Lloyd, the player, that people think they know.
“People had to get used to that,” she tells The Athletic. “They had to understand me a little bit more. But the fanbase and media only saw the competitor Carli. They only saw me with raging, bulging eyes, like I wanted to hurt somebody and be the ultra, uber-competitor. And that was the way that I was going to be able to survive.
“And when I look back at my career and reflect, ‘Would I have done things differently?’, I do think I maybe would have tried to enjoy things a little bit more. But I had to have a guard up, because I had some coaches that kind of stabbed me in the back. And you’re part of a team where everybody’s competing with one another. So that guard stayed up until I announced my retirement.
“And I felt, in the last couple of months, I could finally be a bit more vulnerable. I could finally be a bit more like myself.”
Lloyd attributes her mindset as a player to the “cut-throat” environment of the United States women’s national team.
“People don’t understand how cut-throat it is,” she says. “I would say that it’s entirely unhealthy, but it’s what made our team the best and it’s what made me the best. It made me into the player and person I am today. I don’t think that (culture) needs to change. In order to be the best, you have to be in an environment that’s really hard.”
Lloyd’s record is testament to that success: 134 goals in 316 international appearances (making her the second-highest appearance-maker and third-highest scorer in USWNT history), as well as a hat-trick in the 2015 World Cup final against Japan.
When Carli Lloyd, the broadcaster of today, speaks about what it takes to be successful at the highest level, she commands an audience.
Lloyd scores the second of her three goals in the 2015 Women’s World Cup final (Dennis Grombkowski/Getty Images)
That has certainly been the view of U.S. broadcaster Fox Sports, whose “summer of soccer” culminates on Sunday with a double bill of the finals of the European Championship (3pm ET) and Copa America (8pm ET). Fox made Lloyd the centrepiece of last summer’s Women’s World Cup coverage and over the past few weeks she has also been a studio analyst during the men’s Copa America.
Lloyd has been engaging and compelling, even if her strident opinions may at times divide opinion: during the Women’s World Cup, she provoked strong feelings when she argued the USWNT players appeared to be celebrating excessively.
But Lloyd is rated highly by broadcasters because she is prepared to give an opinion. She does not do wishy-washy. She “wasn’t surprised” by Alex Morgan’s recent omission from the USWNT Olympic roster and thinks “there needs to be a change” with the U.S. men’s national team, too — the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) is conducting a review following a disappointing Copa America in which Gregg Berhalter’s side did not progress beyond the group phase.
(Left to right) Rob Stone, Clint Dempsey, Lloyd and Alexi Lalas on Fox (Photo: Fox Sports)
“(The U.S. co-hosted men’s World Cup in) 2026 is looming very quickly,” Lloyd says. “Gregg is a great person and I don’t think that there’s just one problem here. But from the outside, they do appear maybe a little bit comfortable, maybe there needs to be some ruffling of feathers and somebody to come in and give a little tough love at times. But that’s just pure speculation.
“From the standpoint of their play, things look a little rigid on the field. Something is just not clicking. With the state the team’s in now — with everybody in an uproar, the fans, sponsors, media, everybody — unfortunately, I think that there needs to be a change.
“You want to go into 2026 with the support of your nation and all those around you. So I do think that there has to be a change, and it needs to be someone that’s outside of the box, somebody international. (Jurgen) Klopp’s name has been thrown out there.”
Is the currently unattached former Liverpool manager her dream hire for the USMNT? “It would be amazing,” Lloyd says. “But there’s no time for development here. This is about 2026 and you want to put the best team out there and get the best result.”
Lloyd is also combative, hitting back on social media when some viewers felt she was wrong to add USMNT captain Christian Pulisic to a roll call of the sport’s all-time greats such as Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi. She also responded last week when one X user criticised her appearance, countering: “You call a pregnant woman big… clearly you haven’t been taught anything in your life to be respectful.”
“I view that as a really sad state of affairs in the world that we live in today,” Lloyd adds. “I’m almost 42, comfortable in my own skin and confident in that regard. But it saddens me that young girls have to go through this.
“Some of the things that have come at me have been hurtful, disgusting, verbally abusive. In this realm of commenting on Copa America, people are telling me to get back into the kitchen, that I don’t belong in men’s sports. You have to have thick skin. I’ve had thick skin throughout my playing career and that has hardened me… And I pride myself on being honest and saying what I think. And that’s not always the popular choice.
“But the block button does come in handy. People come at me about blocking, but I just don’t have time for people to constantly be coming at me. You just don’t deserve to even see what’s happening on my feed.”
Lloyd won the World Cup with the USWNT in 2015 and 2019 (Naomi Baker – FIFA via Getty Images)
Would it dissuade Lloyd from appearing in the future as an analyst?
“No, it would never put me off, because the most important thing in my life is my circle of people. I don’t get my worth or my justification on how good of a job I’m doing from all of these people on social media. The majority of them are just angry that other people are successful and they’re not happy themselves.”
Lloyd will be present in the Fox studio for the Copa America final this weekend. She says she feels pride in joining others, such as sideline reporter Jenny Taft and former England international Kelly Smith, who have previously broadcast while pregnant. “Jenny said that I can use some of her wardrobe if need be,” says Lloyd. “It’s giving people the confidence to know that, just because you’re pregnant, you can still be on TV and, I’m embracing it all.
“Sure, my body has changed, pretty drastically, from the way that I was as an athlete. But I’m growing a human being inside of me, and I think it’s one of the most amazing things and just such a miracle and I’m just proudly enjoying it.”
In her open letter in Women’s Health, Lloyd explained the psychological and physical challenges she endured in her attempts to become pregnant. At one point, she said she began to question why her body was failing her. Lloyd revealed she became pregnant after three rounds of IVF. She would now like more young athletes, and more young women in general, to receive greater education on the topic and have access to wider conversations.
“It would be healthy if more people understand that a woman is born with a certain amount of eggs and, as you age, your eggs are ageing,” she says. “Maybe if there were other opportunities, if there were teams that I was on that were sponsored or linked up with a fertility clinic where you had the option and you had the support to have your eggs frozen. You can’t be working out for several weeks while you go through the process.
“It would be good if we can talk about it more, educate younger players and have those those options available. I do know that several NWSL teams (the top division of the women’s club game in the U.S.) are partnered with fertility clinics, which is great, but hopefully more jump on board.
“I was very naive and had no idea what I was walking into. And there are a lot of women in the sports world and business world that nowadays do want to put off having kids. And times have changed. And in that department, things also need to change.”
(Top photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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