​SOUTHPORT, England — At Royal Birkdale Golf Club, a golfer either must be patient, or he becomes one.The famed links course in this seaside town on the West Lancashire coast, population 95,000, is 18 miles north of Liverpool, where the Beatles first belted out their songs. It welcomes a field of 156 for the 154th British Open this week. Preparations to accommodate more than 300,000 golf fans, a record for the Open, have been under way for a long time.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe club moved to its current site in 1897 on a strip of England’s largest and most dramatic sand dunes, the type usually found on the west coast of Ireland.”It’s nature’s first TPC,” past U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy once said, noting Birkdale was a natural stadium course long before former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman had the idea of building them. The prolific English golf writer Bernard Darwin suggested Royal Birkdale was laid out in such heaven-sent country for golf architects that it was impossible to make a bad hole anywhere.Royal Birkdale Golf Club features a strip of England’s largest and most dramatic sand dunes, and this week plays host to the British Open for the 11th time since 1954.Since Jordan Spieth won here in 2017, there have been nine tees improved or tweaked, while the long 15th is now the 14th and even longer for the championship at 600 yards, with a new, heavily sloping green. The new 15th is an equally forbidding character. Off the championship tees, this par 3 with the green sitting in the dunes tips in at 241 yards long. The overall course yardage has been extended by 67 yards to 7,223 yards, though three holes – Nos. 5, 7 and 16 – have all been shortened since 2017, and the number of bunkers have been reduced from 127 to 108.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBirkdale begins with arguably the toughest opening hole in the Open rota. There are two choices at this demanding tee shot. Some players will be aggressive and hit driver, which is what players tend to do when there’s nothing on the line. But this is The Open. In the final round of the 2008 Open, Padraig Harrington trailed 54-hole leader Greg Norman by three shots. Norman was the best driver of the golf ball of his generation and he had a driver in his hands up until it was his turn to play, when he switched back to an iron.The only hole more punishing is the 514-yard par-4 sixth, the longest ever par-4 used for the championship and a mirror image of the first, a dogleg right with a bunker eating into the angle of the dogleg and an uphill approach. It has ranked as the hardest hole in every Open held here since statistics were first kept in 1983, and played to an average of 4.768 in 2008, and yielded just 10 birdies all week. Harrington calls it a par 4 1/2.Birkdale, which earned “Royal” distinction in 1951 and hosted its first Open in 1954, is hardly the greybeard that St. Andrews is, but it has been the site of much history. In 1961, Arnold Palmer