By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2017

As a spokesman (and as a human), George Atallah, MBA ’09, is dismayed by the state of spokespeople.

He is the voice of one of the most high-profile unions in the United States—the NFL Players Association—and he says that when spokespeople fabulate, it cuts at the credibility of all spokespeople.

“Language matters. Language matters a lot,” says Atallah, whose official title at the NFLPA is assistant executive director of external affairs. “The words that come out of an official institution, like the government, like Congress, like the White House, like any institution that has a public interest—language matters. And so it is very troubling to me that we’re entering a phase where the literal meaning of words is diminished, and that doesn’t only hurt our profession, it hurts everyone, right?”

The 39-year-old Atallah is sitting casually in his glass office a few floors above 20th Street NW between L and M streets. It’s late January and there has been some debate about a certain crowd size. There are philosophy books on his shelves. He spent last summer rereading Fear and Trembling.

Atallah is tall-ish, has worn a rubber band on his wrist since high school—a tan line-making reminder to always “snap back”—and is an immigrant. He came over from Lebanon and settled in Queens, N.Y., with his parents as a baby, swaddled by Marlboro cigarette boxes in a bassinet. The cigarettes, cheaper in Lebanon than the United States, were for relatives already here. A self-described people person, Atallah double-majored in English and philosophy at Boston College and is a candid tweeter with nearly 34,000 followers.

He has been the NFLPA’s spokesman since 2009 when NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith hired him from Qorvis, a Washington, D.C.-based PR firm where Smith and Atallah met.

Atallah’s NFLPA tenure has been largely free of credibility-quashing blunders and he is generally well-regarded by the media that covers him. He says there are only two things he’s said in eight years at the NFLPA that he really regrets.

The first involved him intentionally cursing because he thought (at the time) he had a great one-liner. He didn’t.

“When you see it pop up in print and you sort of go, ‘Probably shouldn’t have done that,’ you know?” Atallah says. “Especially when your dad calls.”

The second gaffe came when a New York Daily News reporter called him late one night—Atallah has two cellphones that’ll probably still be beeping long after we’re engulfed by the sun—and asked about the NFLPA’s stance on an HGH-related issue. Atallah, a new parent at the time, had been up for days. He was tired and cranky and probably just should have let voicemail take it.

“I deviated from the institutional position that we had taken for 30 years,” Atallah says. “I didn’t think about it at the time, and the next day in the Daily News, there is this angry picture of [Smith]. I can’t even remember what—opposed or for HGH—whatever it was that I said, it just blew up in my face.”

Being a spokesman is a lot like being a stand-up comic. The job demands that you always be on, and intellectually and verbally spry. An off day can leave you and your organization banjaxed into oblivion. There are hecklers.

Atallah says he likes his job because he likes people and especially the people he works with and for: the NFL players. He says those relationships have excised from him his once-fervent New York Giants fanhood. Now, he just roots for everyone to not get hurt.

Since joining the NFLPA, Atallah, by trying to influence public opinion, has helped fight for players’ rights, notably attempting to ensure that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady got a fair shake from the NFL during “Deflategate.” During the 2011 lockout, Atallah was a part of shooting down an owner-led push for an 18-game regular season. He’s given a voice to initiatives to improve player health and safety, working on concussion prevention and reducing tackling and hitting in practice. In Atallah’s tenure, the NFLPA also has fought for the more responsible dispensing of prescription drugs to injured players.

Atallah describes himself as the players’ “public advocate” and not an apparatchik. But he knows people are prone to think him the latter, and he does what he can to counter that perception.

“When you ask the question, ‘Is everything I say true?’ in my role, equally as important as truth is trust,” Atallah says. “And if I ever stepped out to a media person and provided misinformation, that erodes that person’s trust in me, and that’s the sort of thing I can’t give up. It’s something that I hold onto very dearly. And look, sometimes, we’re not always going to be winning an issue publicly. The goal is not: ‘Yeah, sure, you want every fan to be on our side.’ No, the goal is: ‘Is this organization advocating for the rights and best possible position for its members?’”

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