PITTSBURGH — Oakmont Country Club is advertised as one of the toughest golf courses in the United States.

The U.S. Open is advertised as the ultimate test for professional golfers.

That’s what made this U.S. Open such an easy fit and a perfect match, as it brought some of the best golfers in the world to their knees. It was won by a relative unknown, a borderline journeyman in J.J. Spaun, and the leaderboard Sunday never had names like Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau, etc., on it.

All the biggest names succumbed to Oakmont Country Club, and most of the players who were in the mix on Sunday couldn’t string together enough good holes to survive. Spaun was about the only one who was able to play consistently for four days, and that’s why he emerged as the winner.

It is kind of funny to me that after the first round, there were a few guys under par. Spaun was 4-under, and people actually began to talk about how Oakmont’s difficulty was overrated. By the end, there was only one player under par, and in order to achieve that, he needed to hit the longest putt of anyone on Sunday to get to 1-under.

The course delivered. It was every bit as tough of a test as advertised, and the scary thing is it might have been even tougher had it been sunny and dry all week, as the rain softened some of the fairways and greens significantly.

One of the easiest ways to tell whether the course is playing tough is the level of whining about it by golfers and some observers all week long.

The biggest complaint was the rough, how thick and unfair it was.

Yes, it was thick, so thick that when I dropped a ball into it just to take a photo, it disappeared, and there were a couple of camera angles where you could not even see it, even though I was right on top of it. There were lies from which golfers had no chance of hitting the ball further than a few yards just to get back to the fairway.

I get it — it was brutal in so many ways, but guess what? This is the U.S. Open. There was $21.5 million in prize money on the line. It isn’t supposed to be easy, and here is my definition of fair: Everyone had to play the same exact course for four days.

As Spaun demonstrated for most of the event, if you keep the ball out of the rough, the course was actually very playable. That is obviously less simple than it sounds, but these are the best golfers on the planet and they get paid extremely well to make shots. This was a weekend when bad shots were penalized often and the players that survived their bad shots were the ones at the top of the leaderboard.

Frankly, I thought the behavior of some of the golfers was embarrassing for the sport. There are emotions that run high, but that doesn’t mean we should excuse bad behavior by professional athletes when things don’t go their way.

Shane Lowry might still be out on the course trying to finish his second round given what his score was, and there were several clips of him voicing his frustration about the course. He was so rattled on the one hole he picked up his ball and forgot to mark it.

I saw at least six different episodes of people slamming clubs down into the fairway and taking a chunk out of it. We saw McIlroy smash a tee marker, and then photos surfaced of a locker allegedly trashed by Wyndham Clark.

All of these actions would get you kicked out of even most low-level public courses and at many places banned for life.

But this weekend we were supposed to just overlook it all because the golf course was beating the golfers. I got news for them — that is how the U.S. Open is supposed to be and how it hopefully will be every year from now until forever.

I don’t mind some of the courses the PGA Tour plays throughout the year, where guys are crushing it and the winning scores are 12-under, 15-under, even 18-under because those events show us just how great these players can strike the ball. Those tournaments are mostly a test of skill and talent, as well as it is the ability to make putts.

The U.S. Open, though, is supposed to be a test of talent and mental toughness. It is supposed to be the one event where the best players must grind through adverse situations and stay focused even when things start to go off the rails.

That’s what happened this past weekend at Oakmont — Spaun won because he was the mentally toughest player out there. He isn’t the most talented, but unlike Sam Burns, unlike Adam Scott, unlike Tyrrell Hatton and a bunch of others, he found a way to keep fighting back every time Oakmont tried to rise up and get him.

Oakmont Country Club was and will always be a great venue for the U.S. Open because it is indeed a difficult course that can be made extremely difficult. This fact was reinforced once again this weekend, as the golf course beat pretty much every player that participated in the U.S. Open.

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