ST. LOUIS -- Forget the original lyrics to this city's most famous song. Forget St. Louie. Meet me in the lobby, Louie. Louie Orr, perhaps. Or Lou Henson. Or even a fresh-faced kid like Jeff Conarroe, a 28-year-old graduate assistant at Ole Miss. They all can be found here in the lobby of the coaches headquarters hotel, the scene of round-the-clock intrigue and riveting drama at this, and every, Final Four.

"A meat market," Paul Griffin, Georgia Tech's senior associate athletics director, calls the Final Four lobby - in this instance, the lobby at the Millennium Hotel on South 4th Street.

"The lobby was a happening," recalled Mike Cingiser, the former Brown coach who led his alma mater to its only Ivy League title in 1986 and still recalls the days when George Raveling was the lobby's one-man Final Four Job Corps.

"It's why a lot of the young coaches come here," said Ed Murphy, once the head coach at Ole Miss, now the AD and successful coach at Division II West Georgia in Carrolton. "To get interviews."

Job interviews, in the biggest jobs fair in college coaching. "Walking through here's very different when you've just gotten the job at Ole Miss, and when you've just been fired by Ole Miss," Murphy said Friday at noon, sitting in the Millennium lobby packed with dozens of basketball coaches. Imagine those migrating sharks just off the beaches in Florida. "One is like you have a communicable disease, and the other's like you've got magnets in your pockets."

This time's neither for Murphy. Here, he's a hoops Switzerland: absolutely neutral. No job openings in Carrolton; not after Murphy just hired a coach to replace an assistant who'd resigned last week.

"I knew who I wanted to hire, so I closed it out," said Murphy. Otherwise, he'd be swamped if the position was still vacant.

"It's absolutely critical for me to be here," said Conarroe, who just finished his second season as a graduate assistant to Rod Barnes at Ole Miss. "I don't get a lot of face time with a lot of coaches during the season. About the only time I can meet some coaches and let them get to know me is here. Now, you're not necessarily hired here."

No, you're not. Yet even when there's no job opening at a school, there are introductions to be made, relationships to be forged for the future, business cards and resumes to be handed out like candy. "It's all part of Networking 101," said Conarroe, who played at Colorado College and had a well-paying job for two years in Denver while coaching JV basketball but left the business world in hopes of coaching college hoops.

At 26, having been accepted into the MBA program at Ole Miss, Conarroe convinced Barnes to take him on as a volunteer manager. He loaded up his Saturn L200, put a trailer hitch on it, rented a trailer, packed up his belongings and drove to Oxford sight-unseen with $1,000 to his name and some credit card debt.

Two years later, still on a scholarship with a monthly stipend ("Small," Conarroe called it, smiling. "Or piddly"), he's still talking with Barnes about next season. "So, in a way, I guess I am kinda looking for a job, too," said Conarroe. "You hear about guys who came in late at night into the hotel, ran into a coach, had a resume in their pocket, gave it to him in the elevator. The next morning, he gets an interview. The guy knocks on the door, the coach comes to his door in his boxers."

And the guy gets the assistant's job at a mid-major Division I school. True story. "The thing to me," said Conarroe, "is just getting in."

Before arriving, Conarroe targeted eight to 10 coaches he wanted to meet and supply with a resumes. "But I've talked to hundreds of coaches," he said. Hundreds? Since arriving Thursday? "I only slept four hours (Thursday) night," Conarroe said, smiling.

Once, the lobby was virtually the personal domain of George Raveling, one of the earliest successful and highly influential African-American coaches in Division I. "Back in the '80s, George prided himself as being the Monster.com of coaches," Cingiser said. "He hung in the lobby talking and matchmaking as much as he was able. There are probably coaches out there who were married by him."

Raveling is still here this week, and his influence can be felt, and seen, everywhere. "I spent some time with Coach Raveling (Thursday) night," said Frank Haith, the highly successful first-year head coach at Miami. "He's a mentor and a guy with a tremendous amount of respect. A lot of young African-American coaches look up to him and seek him out."

"George broke down a lot of barriers for a lot of people," Murphy said. "The lobby has changed a lot in the years since George (started coaching and powerbroking), and he was a big part of that (racial diversity). He's paved the way for a lot of bright, sharp black coaches who've done very well. And the game owes George a lot for that."

Raveling gave Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt his first full-time Division I assistant's job at Southern Cal. At the 1997 Final Four in Indianapolis, a young coach named Michael Perry was watching TV in Tubby Smith's hotel room when the news flashed that Lefty Driesell was Georgia State's new head coach. Perry later got word that Lefty wanted to talk; they met the next day in the coaches hotel lobby, conducted an interview and Perry became Driesell's top assistant - then his successor when Lefty retired.

On Friday, the Millennium lobby was packed. Georgia's Dennis Felton. UConn's Jim Calhoun. John Thompson, both of 'em: the patriarch who built Georgetown into a national champion, and his son, John III, who's attracting considerable interest here from young coaches.

"I try not to stay in here as much as I used to, try to move in and out pretty quickly," Haith said. A successful head coach, Haith knows, can be full-court trapped in the lobby. "I've had probably six, seven guys come up to me, give me their card, ask about the business or ask me to help them," he said. "Coach (Dave) Odom (Haith's old Wake Forest boss who just won the NIT at South Carolina) has an opening on his staff. And East Carolina, too. Ricky Stokes and I are good friends."

A good friend of a friend with a job opening is a prime target in the lobby. During the 1996 Final Four at the Meadowlands, Tech's Griffin was the AD at South Florida and searching for a new coach. Staying at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, Griffin interviewed one candidate in his hotel room. "I underestimated the inquisitiveness of the local (Tampa and St. Petersburg) media, who were perched on the floor by my door, watching who came off the elevator."

The next interview took place in the coaches headquarters hotel. "You meet with a guy in the lobby and shake hands and go upstairs to talk," Griffin said. "Everybody's giving you, `Whoa."' To interview the third candidate, Griffin arranged to talk to Seth Greenberg at his mother's Midtown Manhattan condo. "To get there, I had to walk past the coaches hotel," said Griffin. "I've got a parade following me, four or five guys: `Hi, Mr. Griffin, who you looking at?' One guy said, `Mr. Griffin, I don't know who you're going to hire. But when you do, would you give him my business card?"'

Jack Wilkinson writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: jwilkinson(at)ajc.com