You'd like to feel a little bit sorry for Andy Silverman, the agent for Lawrence Phillips. I mean, it's one thing to zealously advocate for the unemployable, but another entirely for the unmotivated.

	Lawrence Phillips

Then again, it isn't as though Phillips is ordering Silverman to keep finding him football jobs. Silverman, by any measure, is doing an absolutely sensational job selling Phillips to team, after team, after team, after team, and now, after team.

But this is Silverman's choice. He finds Phillips a job. He negotiates a contract. Then he waits a bit until Phillips leaves his team without telling anyone he's leaving, and Silverman stands there giving it the old Ralph Kramden: "Humm-a-nah, humm-a-nah, humm-a-nah.''

Silverman's newest tap-dance is being performed in Montreal, where Phillips just walked out on the CFL's Alouettes despite being the league's leading rusher on an undefeated team.

Now we uninitiated would ask the question, "So are we finally convinced NOW that football isn't Larry's calling?'' But that's just the question Andy Silverman tries to rebut as a condition of his future employment.

So the question then becomes, "So Andy, are YOU finally convinced now that football isn't Larry's calling?''

Silverman could, for example, become the agent for Jeremy Bloom, the champion skier who just burned all his endorsement contracts so that he could play football at the University of Colorado. There wouldn't be much money in being an agent for a college football player (at least not a legally recognized one, anyway), but at least getting the lad to attend the daily practice wouldn't seem to be nearly so difficult.

By now, there is no use in opening the back of Phillips' head and rooting around the wiring. Better folks have tried, and come up with grease stains on their foreheads from scratching their heads in bafflement. His issues are many, varied, and each of them comes with a skull-and-crossbones warning.

Phillips was nearly anonymous in Montreal, where the front-page story in Monday's Montreal Gazette was Saku Koivu's summer hockey regimen after overcoming cancer. He was succeeding, he was being left alone, and he was on a winning team in a fabulous city.

And he leaves. ... I know, I know. Big deal.

Silverman is no Scott Boras, Arn Tellem or Tom Condon, clearly. His clients have not made him fabulously famous, anyway. He must either believe deeply in Lawrence Phillips the athlete, or be low on clients.

Still, standing up and answering for his client while Phillips shows Montreal his taillights cannot be fun, especially for someone whose professional career has been all about taillights. And you wonder why he does it.

Then you realize you don't care why he does it, any more than you care why people make the best wedges on kickoffs, juggle dynamite sticks as street art, or gargle with liquid cement. You shrug, you say, "Thank God I've got this swell job cold-calling old ladies and getting them to invest in the stock market.''

Yet, Andy Silverman makes Lawrence Phillips make sense. I mean, shouldn't someone believe in the unbelievable? Shouldn't someone stand by the dry well hoping it'll some day emit oil? Shouldn't someone hold on to their WorldCom stock, just in case?

We don't want to ascribe overly noble motives here. We don't know Silverman, and don't know that he might not have some fabulous master plan for Phillips we don't see. We prefer rather to marvel at the depth of his belief in an occupation that requires extraordinary cynicism just to brush one's teeth every morning.

If a man can sell pathological absenteeism this well, then our hats are off to him. He is the agent's version of point man on the bomb disposal unit, and while most folks can't see a reason for it, it is clearly a job that someone has to do.

After all, even the world's tiniest niche still needs filling . . . with, apparently, the world's tiniest spackling knife.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com