It’s 5:20 a.m. on an ordinary day at Rancho Park, perhaps the busiest golf course in the continental United States. Although the first group won’t tee off for another hour, 40 people are already lined up at the starter’s booth to put their names on a waiting list. Black, white, Hispanic and Asian, male and female, young and old, they are a microcosm of the city. One man wears a cap that advertises Midas Touch Massage Therapy. Behind him stands a fellow with a hat bearing the words Citta del Vaticano.

Inside the booth, Bob White juggles a radio linking him with the course marshals and two phones that won’t stop ringing. Every caller wants something White cannot give: a starting time. “I’m sorry, I’m looking at the sheet and I don’t see anything,” says White. “You can come down and get on the list, though. Okay. See you then.”

As he hangs up the phone, White explains that the disappointed golfer on the other end was Therman Calloway Jr., superintendent for this very course. It’s his day off, but even he may not get to play. “I can’t do anyone a favor,” says White. “If people found out that we played favorites, the complaining would be unbelievable. This place is just too popular.”

Rancho Park Golf Club is enormously popular for a number of reasons. First, it’s the solitary 18-hole public course in a densely populated, golf-crazy area covering all of West L.A., Santa Monica and half a dozen adjacent communities.

Second, it is a mature, challenging layout, good enough to have played host to the old Los Angeles Open 17 times between 1956 and 1983. Rancho Park is beautifully decorated with specimen trees, hundreds of established eucalyptus, pine and magnolia. The course, rated 70.1 with a slope of 123 from the white tees, is fair to the high-handicapper, but also a proper test for better players with its narrow fairways and hilly terrain. Bunkers are few here, but so are level lies.

Third is Rancho’s rich history, which includes many of the great names of modern golf. Billy Casper, Ken Venturi and Arnold Palmer all won here. George Archer shot a course-record 61. Palmer made a 12 at the 18th hole and a plaque there commemorates this dubious feat.

Finally, in a region where fees are often sky high, Rancho Park can be savored for a song - $20 weekdays, $25 on weekends and holidays and $12-$15 at twilight. For these bargain prices, players get access to the sort of urban oasis often reserved for the rich. Except for the beach at Malibu, which is free, it may be the best bargain, of any kind, in the Los Angeles area.

All of Rancho’s attractions add up to more than 130,000 rounds played every year, and a huge challenge for the people who operate and maintain the course. In a city where power, money and celebrity rule, enormous pressure is applied in attempts to secure a starting time at Rancho Park.

“People offer money, they threaten, they beg,” says course manager Mary Keener, “and there’s nothing we can do.” A telephone reservation system blunts power plays, and everyday golfers can see the system is fair when celebrities who are regulars - Smokey Robinson, Elke Sommers, George Hamilton - get no special treatment.

Though starters and managers are protected by the reservation system, Rancho’s course superintendent and crew face a daily inescapable battle with the crowds. They must keep the course in condition even though it is fully booked - all day every day - and closes only in the worst weather. (On average, the course is closed fewer than 10 days annually.)

“People expect a golf course in prime condition, like what they see on TV, and they don’t want to be inconvenienced by our crew,” says superintendent Calloway. “Most of the time, we can give them what they want.”

To give L.A.’s golfers what they want, greens are cut almost every day. Fairways and roughs must be mowed two or three times each week. Bunkers have to be filled and smoothed. Scarred ground must be repaired, and trees have to be trimmed. A great deal of this work proceeds while the course is open to play.

To keep up with the work, the Rancho crew starts its day a good hour and a half before sunrise. On this morning Nate Watson, head gardener, flicked on the lights of his mower at five o’clock. (When daylight hours peak, his start-time will be as early as 4 a.m.) With a solid head start on the golfers, Watson and two helpers race through the front nine, cutting all the greens and fringe areas, plus the putting surfaces of the nine-hole, par-3 course that is part of the Rancho complex.

Though the mowing might be completed sooner if a second team started on the back nine, Rancho’s location makes this impossible. That nine adjoins an upscale subdivision called Cheviot Hills, and local ordinances bar the use of noisy equipment before 7 a.m. By then, Watson and company are finishing the front of the course and head immediately for the back nine. Later they will cut the four practice greens near the clubhouse.

“We’re fast, but we know what we are doing,” says Watson. Like everyone else on the crew, he is a veteran of the city recreation and parks department. Watson has worked for the department for 10 years. Nearly all of that time has been spent operating and repairing mowers. He can hear the wear in the blades.

“We’ve got old equipment, but I can tell by the sound it makes whether the blades need sharpening or something needs adjustment, and we get on it,” Watson says. “We keep them going. And we keep the golf course in shape. It’s an honor to play on this course and to work on it.”

The honor comes with a large dose of stress. As a municipal course, Rancho has a tight maintenance budget. The staff includes just 13 full-time workers, compared with 35 at nearby private Riviera Country Club. And Rancho’s supply budget, only $90,000, is about half that spent at Riviera.

“I’m not sure how they do it with so few guys,” marvels Riviera’s superintendent, Paul Ramina. In the fraternity of local superintendents, the Rancho job is acknowledged as one of the toughest. “A place like Rancho could take up all your days, and you still wouldn’t sleep at night,” Ramina adds. “There is just too much to worry about.”

If Calloway, 38, is worried, it doesn’t show. He insists that he is accustomed to 12-hour shifts, and that his understaffed crew has the experience and talent to handle the work. Calloway studied engineering at California State-Northridge for three years but has never had a full-time job out of the golf business. He has worked at various city courses since 1983, including eight years on the Rancho crew before becoming superintendent in 1998. Tall and strong, he is an avid golfer who can drive the ball 250 yards and plays to a 13 handicap - when he can get on the course.

Most of Calloway’s workers were senior gardeners at other city courses or parks before moving up to Rancho, the premier municipal facility. If they need extra motivation, says Calloway, he provides it with praise, appeals to their pride and the occasional loud warning.

“I do what I have to because we must get a lot more out of our people,” he says. “It’s not just that we don’t have enough people. It’s the traffic on the course. So many people are out there that the greens, the tees, even the fairways take a beating. To keep the grass growing and course playable, we have to do certain things more often here.”

The best example of this is the frequent aeration done on greens, teeing grounds and fairways. This has to be done because heavy foot traffic and equipment compacts the soil, which restricts drainage and encourages grass to develop fungus and even rot. Rancho’s greens have been aerated as many as six times a year. Fairways are treated with turf-slicing machines three times a year. This is about twice as often as is done at nearby private clubs.

“Golfers are informed a month in advance of our plans to aerate,” says Calloway. “We have to plan to do it in between outings and tournaments, which we have several times each week. Once we get out to do the work, we go fast and get things back into play. Of course, it’s a whole lot easier now that we’ve got new greens and alternates. With alternates, we can give a green a rest and not use temporary holes.”

Rancho’s new bentgrass greens, built upon sand bases in 1999 and 2000, ended a problem that had vexed Rancho superintendents for decades. The work on the greens has consumed most of the $2 million spent on improvements at Rancho over the past five years. All 18 regular greens, 14 alternates and the practice greens were rebuilt. City officials are unsure when the formerly private course was built, but it has been open to the public since 1949. Until the renovation, it featured its original, clay-based greens and poa annua grass. Compacted and poorly drained, those greens routinely developed fungus, and the grass often died in the summer heat. No amount of fungicide, aerating or water could help.

“A lot of superintendents left the job because of those greens,” says Calloway, whose father was superintendent at Woodley Lakes, a city course in the San Fernando Valley. “But we haven’t lost a green since these new ones were put in. With the alternates we have the ability to shut any one down to give it attention, and the golfers aren’t affected.”

The alternate greens are Calloway’s most important ally in the war against the 260,000 feet that tread Rancho every year. No course in the region has extra putting surfaces on every hole. They are the envy of superintendents at busy courses everywhere. At Ala Wai Golf Course in Honolulu, where even more rounds are played, superintendent Clarence Nakatsukasa says the alternates let Calloway avoid the dreaded temporary greens that must sometimes be used at Ala Wai.

“That’s a nice set up,” Nakatsukasa says wistfully of Rancho. “It’s really ideal for a busy course.”

Though the construction of the alternate greens improved playing conditions, they do nothing to reduce crowds, so the Rancho grounds staff must still cope with heavy traffic. When he moved from a city park job to Rancho three years ago, irrigation specialist Bert Yoshinaga struggled at first to learn how to time his work with the foursomes on the course. “I got hit a couple times, and when they’re on the fly, those balls hurt,” he says with a smile. Yoshinaga, 46, came to Rancho in 1998, after a decade of working at various city parks.

On a typical morning Yoshinaga may have to replace a sprinkler head that jammed during the night and flooded a patch of fairway. He may have to jump to turn off the water when a mower clips a sprinkler head or dig to replace a pipe. The time required to complete each task grows with every group of golfers that passes through.

“This morning I had to fix a sprinkler head in the middle of a fairway,” adds Yoshinaga. “It really only takes about five or 10 minutes to dig in, unscrew a head and screw another one on. But I had to stop six times while someone hit their ball. So the job took half an hour.”

For the most part, golfers and crew make way for each other. But a few players take their anger out on crew members. “You are an easy target out there,” says Yoshinaga. “I had one guy hit a bad shot, throw down another ball and hit it right at me, on purpose. I hadn’t done anything. I just happened to be there.”

After four years on a mower, senior gardener Al Avalos has concluded that low-handicappers are more likely to lose their tempers and to be vocal about the condition of the course. One day, Avalos is charged with maintaining the teeing grounds and putting greens for the first six holes. He starts by positioning the tee markers and moving the holes. He then races to cut as much grass as he can before play.

“They want a true putt on every green, and if the rough isn’t cut they don’t want to hear that someone called in sick or equipment broke,” he says. Avalos still resents players who show him no courtesy on the course, but he has come to understand complaints about the placements of tees and holes. “I didn’t know what people were talking about until I started playing the game myself a couple of years ago.”

Because it is a low-fee, public course, Rancho attracts many players who, like Avalos, are new to the game. Without proper instruction, beginners can tear up the course. Crew members have watched in dismay as first-time golfers seize irons to whack their balls off alternate greens, despite signs instructing them to take a free drop. On the fairways, many beginners have a tendency to make divot scrapes large enough to plant trees in. To combat this problem, starters pass out fliers explaining how to take care of divots. They post reminders about repairing ball marks on the greens. too. Free ball mark repairing tools are given out and marshals continually encourage repairs.

Compliance is about what one might expect. Many players repair the damage they cause, but not all. On a private course, marshals might be empowered to ask those who tear up turf to leave. But Rancho is a municipal course, owned by the taxpayers who play it. And the only true power the marshals have is the power of persuasion.

To combat the ravages of heavy play, the maintenance staff continually fills divots and repairs ball marks. Tees are closed periodically to give them a chance to heal.

Overseeding is done with a special, four-grass blend that it supposed to grow year-round and resist wear. Sod is sometimes transplanted from isolated sections of the course to the most heavily trod spots.

Other problems impinge on the operation at Rancho. A few years back, an airplane trying to land at Santa Monica Airport crash-landed on the course, tearing up part of the layout. Seven years ago, crude oil leaked from a well site that sits smack in the middle of the course. A mixture of water and black sludge covered three acres of the course, which the company operating the pump paid to clean up.

Besides the 18-hole course and its practice greens, Calloway’s crew care for a nine-hole par-3 course, its two practice greens and a double-decker driving range. These areas get heavy use from golfers who lack the time, or the reservations, to play the par-71 layout.

At 6:30 p.m., as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, two players in the final group decide to call it a day, but two remain, determined to complete the round. On the tee of the 18th hole, they hear an announcement over the loudspeaker: “The clubhouse is now closed.”

Undaunted, Peter Chung, an experienced player, seizes his driver and fires a shot about 240 yards, to the point where the hole bends left toward the clubhouse. Ai Azuma, a beginner, puts her ball into the fairway too, but about half as far. Azuma and Chung manage to keep track of their golf balls and putt out at the 18th green to fill in the last spaces on their scorecards. Chung, who is visiting the area from New York, declares Rancho Park to be “a phenomenal layout.”

Azuma agrees. “We had a great day, on a beautiful course,” she says. “And it was not expensive.” As she walks up a slightly inclined path toward the parking lot, her smiling face is illuminated by the lights of the driving range, which is open until 9:30 p.m. Every spot on the range is filled, with women in matching outfits, men in T-shirts and kids barely big enough to control a club. They hit so many balls that the range sounds like a giant popcorn popper working full-blast.

The busy practice range is one more indication of the high demand for precious golf resources in the city. With little land available for new courses, there’s no reason to expect the pressure to ease. One proposed solution, advocated even by some local golfers, is to raise the fees so high that demand dips.