I wasn’t at Pebble Beach this year, but I have covered 11 other U.S. Opens at Merion, Shinnecock, Congressional, Bethpage, Pinehurst, Winged Foot, The Country Club (Brookline) and Baltusrol.

Without fail, several players will complain about the USGA setup for the tournament. And usually only two or three holes at most are the culprits.

This year, though, there were more complaints rising from the players than usual, and by now everybody has heard about Ryan Moore’s unflattering take on the USGA setup at Pebble.

The USGA is pretty glib about it. Longtime former executive director Frank Hannigan used to emphasize that even-par should be a good score for the winner (which 2010 champion Graeme McDowell happened to manage).  Current executive director David Fay has been frequently cited for his remark, “The USGA isn’t trying to embarrass the best players in the world, it is trying to identify them.”

The problem, though, and players including Moore certainly know this, isn’t all the fault of the USGA. Sometimes some of these old classic courses just have really bad green structures, like 14 at Pebble. That hole has long been the scene of miserable encounters for the best golfers in the world. Should a course like Pebble Beach be eliminated from the USGA rotation because it has one or two stinkers? Apparently the USGA feels not.

The US Open courses are never going to be the player-friendly venues that the PGA Tour provides its members all season, so they can shoot 20-under par for the benefit of entertainment. When the first Open was played at Pebble Beach in 1972, more good players had shot more bad scores that at anytime since the 1935 Open at Oakmont.

Moore was not the first to suggest that ill-luck often supplanted skill at this course — something Jack Nicklaus said about the final round in 1972. And Nicklaus won that tournament.

Unfortunately for Moore — and Phil Mickelson and Tigers Woods — and other players who vented their unhappiness with the USGA, it is not going to change.

When Angel Cabrera won at Oakmont in 2007 with a score of +5, there was a steady stream of negative commentary from more than a handful of players.

“Ask the guy who won it, how he feels about the course,” said Johnny Miller, who had won his title at Oakmont.

During the first Open at Pebble Beach, which Nicklaus won with a +2 score of 290, a round of 80 began to look like a respectable score.

After Mason Rudolph shot a third-round 86 he noted that, “This course is built right around my game. It touches no part of it.”

So miserable golf among great players is nothing new on this course that was built by two amateur golfers in 1919.

Yet, Nicklaus has called Pebble Beach the best “thinking man’s golf course in the country and possibly the world.” A case can be made that such a definition is the exception, rather than the rule, for the courses that the PGA Tour players inhabit week after week.

That golf courses have evolved from sheep pastures to pristine, manicured lawns and gardens over the past 150 years hasn’t taken the unlucky bounce out of the game — though heaven knows most golfers would prefer that.

But (and this is where Moore’s comments are a bit of disservice to the man who won the tournament) more than either skill or luck, what it takes to win the U.S. Open is guts. And the winner, McDowell, had those down the stretch of the tournament that Gene Sarazen once called “72 little hells.”

At Pinehurst in 1999, Miller, working on the broadcast, said trying to hit some of the small, hilly greens was like trying to land a ball on top of a VW beetle. Payne Stewart, the winner of that year’s event, was the only player who finished under par and pushed back against a few players who complained about “tricked-up conditions.” Stewart said it was an absolutely brilliant golf course and completely fair and an honor to have won on it.