Never has the future of professional golf been put on display as dramatically as it will be on Thursday and Friday at Conway Farms.

The Lake Forest private facility has a dream threesome teeing of at 11:53 a.m. Thursday and 12:59 p.m. on Friday. That’s when Jason Day, Jordan Spieth and Rickie Fowler begin their bids for the title in the first two rounds of the BMW Championship. It’ll be the first time the young stars have played together in a threesome at a PGA Tour event.

“We’re going to have a blast,’’ said Fowler. “The three of us really enjoy playing together, and our caddies are all good friends. It’d be fun if we can build some momentum with all of us playing well the first two days, but there won’t be any shortage of smiles and laughs going on.’’

They’re playing together because they rank 1-2-3 in the FedEx Cup standings. In regular tournaments the pairings are determined by tournament officials; in the playoffs they’re determined by playoff standings.

Day is 27, Fowler 26 and Spieth 22. That’s as close as golf has come to a “Big Three’’ since the days when Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player were in their heydays, and that legendary trio never played for the money that the Day-Fowler-Spieth group is chasing this week.

The BMW Championship, third event of the four-tournament FedEx Cup Playoffs, is a 72-hole competition with and $8.25 million prize fund and no cut for the 70 qualifiers. Sunday’s champion will receive $1,485,000.

Spieth didn’t survive the 36-hole cut in the first two playoff events but could still win the $10 million bonus awarded after next week’s Tour Championship in Atlanta. Spieth downplayed the back-to-back missed cuts.

“Everything feels normal. My game is in a solid state,’’ he said. “It’s just a matter of getting it rolling, get into a groove and start seeing some putts go in.’’

The FedEx point standings include results during the 47-event regular season. That’s why Spieth, winner of the Masters and U.S. Open, is in the mix despite his recent slump. Day won The Barclays, the first playoff event, and Fowler took the last one, the Deutsche Bank Championship. They’re using the BMW Championship to get into position for the big prize, to be awarded in Atlanta.

Any player ranked in the top five in the FedEx standings after this week’s tourney will win the big bonus with a win in The Tour Championship, and there is some long-term strategy involved.

“Just playing good golf and trying to win both tournaments. That’s the plan,’’ said Day. “Winning takes care of everything. That’s great to say right now, but it’s obviously harder to do.’’

Actually, there’s precedent for none of the “Big Three’ winning either this week or next. If a player down the list gets hot, he could claim the $10 million bonus as well.

“Exactly,’’ said Day. “You look at Billy Horschel last year and Camilo (Villegas) a few years back (2008). Things like this can happen.’’

Horschel, in this week’s field but down in 67th place in the FedEx standings, tied for second in the Deutsche Bank Championship last year and then won the BMW and the Tour Championship. Coupled with the bonus, he won $13,477,333 in just the final month of the season.

Players have taken different approaches in the FedEx Cup season. Some, with enough points going in, feel a week’s rest would be beneficial in the long run and skip a tournament. Phil Mickelson, most notably, has tried that tactic in the past and Sergio Garcia trumped him by skipping the first two tournaments this year. Both, though, will have to play well to get inside the top 30 – a requirement for play in Atlanta. Garcia enters the BMW at No. 54 in the standings and Mickelson is No. 61.

While all the players want to win the BMW Championship, the secondary goal is just to get into the top five on the point standings. Any of those five would win the bonus with a win in Atlanta regardless of where any of the other players finish.

Behind the Day-Spieth-Fowler trio in the top five are Sweden’s Henrik Stenson, who won the bonus in 2013, and Bubba Watson.

Funniest thing about the Gardner Heidrick Pro-Am, the last tuneup for the PGA Tour stars competing in this week’s BMW Championship at Conway Farms in Lake Forest.

The player grabbing the most attention wasn’t one of the professional golfers. It was actor/comedian Bill Murray, a long-time favorite in such golf events. Not only did Murray play in the tourney’s pro-am for the first time, so did his five brothers.

Murray was in a foursome headed by Charley Hoffman. Brothers Brian, Ed and Andy played with Gary Woodland and John and Joel Murray teed off with Jim Furyk. The pro-am also included Bears’ legend Brian Urlacher and new Bulls’ coach Fred Hoiberg, but Bill Murray was clearly the star of the show.

Hoffman led his team to the tee immediately after the first afternoon group – one headed by PGA champion and current FedEx Cup point leader Jason Day – teed off. As soon as Day’s group left the tee the gallery around the tee tripled in anticipation of Murray’s arrival and he had a following all the way around the course.

All the Murrays were caddies at the Indian Hill Club while growing up in Winnetka. They’re also partners in a popular Florida bar restaurant named CaddieShack, the name being derived from a popular golf-themed movie that had Bill as one of its stars.

Dressed in colorful, clearly non-traditional golf attire, Bill Murray delights galleries with his on-course antics but he’s had playing success, too. Paired with Illinois native D.A. Points, Murray has been a winner in the PGA Tour’s longstanding AT&T Pro-Am at Pebble Beach in California. This year he also was a hit at the John Deere Classic Pro-Am in the Quad Cities.

After Wednesday’s pro-am all six Murray brothers were inducted into the Caddie Hall of Fame in a ceremony in the Conway Farms clubhouse.

Jim Furyk wasn’t happy to hear about the changes made to the Conway Farms course in preparation for this week’s BMW Championship.

“Bummer,’’ he said. “Now I’ve got to learn it all over again.’’

Well, hardly. Tuesday is practice day for the 70 players who will begin the 72-hole competition at the Lake Forest layout on Thursday. They’ll find the changes to the course from 2013 relatively minor and — even without practice — it’s safe to say Furyk knows the course. Two years ago he covered it in 59 strokes in that first BMW Championship played there.

Furyk didn’t win the tournament – he finished third, three strokes behind champion Zach Johnson – but his hot second round made him the sixth player to break 60 in a PGA Tour event, joining Al Geiberger, Chip Beck, David Duval, Paul Goydos and Stuart Appleby.

“It was a pretty incredible feeling,’’ said Furyk, looking ahead to the third tournament of the four-event FedEx Cup Playoffs. “I got off to a great start, held it together in the middle after three-putting No. 5 and then had the mental hurdle of making birdies on two of the last four. My attitude and thinking process throughout that day was as good as it’s ever been.’’

Luke Donald, the former world No. 1 and a Conway Farms member, remains dazzled by what Furyk did. Donald’s best round on his home course is 61.

“It’s the type of course you can see that number if you’re really on,’’ Donald said. “But Jim did it on a cold, windy day when the next best score was 65. That round was special.’’

“I remember with a couple holes left thinking `How many times in your life will you get a chance to do something like this. Enjoy it, but don’t let it slip by.’’’

He didn’t, but there is a touch of mystery still connected to that epic day. Furyk posed for photographers with a ball emblazoned with the numbers “59.’’

Now he’ll admit that that wasn’t the ball he used to shoot the low score. A PGA Tour media official took a ball from Furyk’s bag and wrote the “59’’ on it. The ball that Furyk used is in his workshop at home but not on display.

“We don’t display stuff,’’ he said. “I might have the glove I used. I do have a stack of flags that I sign for charities.’’

The lack of interest in memorabilia isn’t limited to the record round, either. Witness what happened to the reward for his victory in the 2003 U.S. Open at Olympia Fields – the lone win in a major for the 45-year tour veteran.

“We don’t have a trophy room,’’ said Furyk. “The U.S. Open trophy sat in the kitchen for maybe six months. Everyone who came by had a drink out of it.’’

The 12-under-par round hasn’t been challenged by PGA Tour players since the 2013 BMW Championship. Last year’s tournament was played at Cherry Hills, in Denver, with Billy Horschel winning the title.

Furyk enters this BMW Championship in ninth place on the playoff standings. He won the $10 million bonus as FedEx Cup champion in 2010 and is in good position to crack the top 30 who qualify for next week’s Tour Championship in Atlanta. That’s where this year’s bonus will be awarded.

Going into the BMW, though, Furyk trails Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Henrik Stenson, Bubba Watson, Charley Hoffman, Zach Johnson and Dustin Johnson.

Gates opened at Conway Farms on Monday with the main attraction being a new event, the Evans Scholars Cup. It involved teams from Chicago area clubs. Donald, who didn’t qualify for the tournament, hosted a fundraiser for the First Tee of Greater Chicago in the evening.

In addition to the practice rounds Tuesday’s schedule includes the CDW Celebrity Skills Challenge at nearby Halas Hall. Golfers Camilo Villegas and Gary Woodland will join Bears’ players in the Fold of Honor benefit event.

The PGA Tour’s visit to Chicago isn’t an annual thing anymore, but when the circuit does come it’s a big deal. That’ll be the case this week when the BMW Championship returns to Conway Farms in Lake Forest.

This week’s $8.25 million event, which tees off on Thursday, is the second of three scheduled stagings at Conway Farms. The first was in 2013, and the third and final visit to Conway will be in 2017.

Last week the Western Golf Assn. announced the BMW Championship sites through 2019 — a continuation of its policy of coming to the Chicago area only every other year. The 2016 tournament will be played at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis. After the next return to Conway the event will move to Aronimink in Philadelphia in 2018 and come back to Chicago, at Medinah, in 2019.

All those events – including this week’s — will be hard-pressed to match the first visit to Conway, which hosted the PGA Tour for the first time in 2013 after being the site of a wide variety of top amateur tournaments.

“Record heat, frost, every weather pattern that week,’’ recalled Vince Pellegrino, senior vice president, tournaments for the Western Golf Assn. “Jim Furyk shooting a 59 when the average score for that day was par, oscillating balls on the first green, Hunter Mahan getting a hole-in-one, weather delays leading to a Monday finish, then Zach Johnson shooting 65 to win by two strokes.’’

This time Johnson is back, but as the reigning British Open champion. Two years ago his profile wasn’t so lofty. He was just worried about surviving this third stage of the FedEx Cup Playoffs – golf’s most lucrative competition. It started with 120 players – determined on a point system after the PGA Tour’s 47-event regular season — competing for $8.25 million at The Barclays in New Jersey. The playoffs then continued with the top 90 competing in Boston’s Deutsche Bank Championship for another $8.25 million.

Conway is the third leg of the season-ending playoff series, and it’ll send 30 players to Atlanta for The Tour Championship where another $8.25 million – plus a $10 million bonus for the series winner – will be on the line. Peak at the right time, and a golfer can become a very rich man in a very short period of time. That’s what happened to Billy Horschel last year, when he won the last two playoff tournaments as well as the bonus in a span of barely three weeks.

The playoffs have been a bit on the weird side midway through the four-tournament series this year. The top two players in the world rankings – Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy – have done little. Spieth, the Masters and U.S. Open champion, didn’t even survive the 36-hole cut in the first two playoff events.

Two other young stars — PGA champion Jason Day and Rickie Fowler – have taken advantage of the Spieth-McIlroy letdown, Day winning The Barclays and Fowler the Deutsche Bank Championship. But all four hotshots, along with Johnson and Horschel, will be in the field at Conway.

There’ll be some notable absentees, to be sure. Tiger Woods didn’t qualify for the FedEx Cup events and three Chicago-connected players who are regulars on the PGA Tour – Conway member Luke Donald, Mark Wilson and Kevin Streelman – were eliminated the Deutsche Bank Championship.

The BMW Championship, though, has never had to worry about getting a great field thanks to its enviable spot as the next-to-the-last stop on the PGA Tour’s tournament schedule. The BMW started a run as the PGA Tournament of the Year in its first playing at Conway.

“We certainly expect this year’s to be as highly successful and well-attended as that one was,’’ said Pellegrino. Since the BMW replaced the Western Open as the PGA’s Chicago tour stop in 2007 the tournament has raised more than $19.6 million for the WGA’s Evans Scholars Foundation, which is financing the college education of 870 caddies this year.

Unlike 2013, the WGA has set an attendance limit for this year’s BMW though the weekly total is still expected to match last year’s 130,000. Crowds will be limited to 27,000 to help create a better spectator experience. The third-round crowd hit 35,000 at Conway two years ago. This year the crowds don’t figure to be as unwieldy and Conway itself will look different.

The club underwent a major renovation since the first PGA Tour visit, the result making the facility much more spectator-friendly. Seating around the 18th green has been doubled and there’s expanded viewing at Nos. 1, 2, 7, 9, 11 and 17. The Beer Garden has also been doubled in size and cart paths have been widened to improve spectator traffic around the course.

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Jim Billiter and Matt Slowinski were cart partners in Wednesday’s final round of the 93rd Illinois PGA Championship. Slowinski called it “a good pairing’’ and said they had a “great time.’’

It was Billiter, though, who hung on to claim the $10,000 first prize in the first big tournament played on Medinah Country Club’s No. 1 Course since Michigan architect Tom Doak completed a major renovation project on it.

Slowinski, the head professional at Conway Farms in Lake Forest, started the round three strokes behind Billiter, an assistant pro at Merit Club in Libertyville. That deficit was gone in two holes, as Slowinski opened with two birdies and Billiter went par-bogey.

“I had to birdie No. 3 or it would have been a different story, maybe,’’ said Billiter, who lost sole possession of the lead and then got it back in a hurry when Slowinski made bogey at No. 3 after Billiter nearly holed his chip shot on the par-4, settling for a tap-in birdie.

Billiter kept the lead the rest of the way but had to do some nifty scrambling to do it. On three straight holes (Nos. 10, 11 and 12) he hooked his tee shots into the trees but managed to punch out his second shots and salvaged pars each time.

“That was the whole tournament right there,’’ said Billiter. “I had no right making par on any of those holes. I deserved to make bogeys.’’

It wasn’t just a Billiter-Slowinski duel. Travis Johns, teaching pro at Medinah and one of the host club’s three pros to survive the 36-hole cut, shot the best score of the final round – a 4-under-par 67. Playing in the group ahead of Billiter and Slowinski, Johns pulled within one shot on the back nine but couldn’t get any closer.

In the end Billiter settled for a shaky 70 and a 9-under-par 204 score for the 54 holes. Slowinski shot 69 and finished two strokes back in second while Johns was another swing back in third.

“I knew it was going to be hard to catch Jim,’’ said Slowinski. “When he hit bad shots he was still making pars. He just didn’t let anyone get close. He kept doing his thing.’’

The victory basically completes a great year for the 29-year old Billiter, who is in his 10th season at Merit Club. He won the IPGA Match Play title in the spring, and is now one of only nine players to capture both of those major IPGA crowns in the same year. Last to do it was Illinois coach Mike Small in 2007. Small, winner of the IPGA Championship the previous two years and 11 times overall, never was in the mix this time. He finished tied for seventh.

Billiter, despite winning two of the four majors put on annually by the IPGA, will be hard-pressed to be its Player of the Year because he didn’t play in the Illinois Open and won’t play in the season-ending IPGA Players Championship next month. His duties with a major charity outing at Merit Club annually keeps him out of the Illinois Open, and this year the club members are taking Billiter along on a trip to Scotland when the Players Championship is played at Eagle Ridge in Galena. Billiter has no regrets.

“That’s (the Scotland trip) a once in a lifetime thing. It’s going to be great,’’ he said.

The IPGA Championship also served as a qualifier for the PGA Professionals Championship. The top nine finishers earned spots and Katie Pius, assistant pro at Biltmore in Barrington and the only woman in the field, was in the mix after two rounds.

Pius, who is four months pregnant, was bidding to become only the fourth woman to qualify for the club professionals’ national championship and the first one from the Illinois Section to do it. She was tied for 13th place after 36 holes, then shot 78 on Wednesday and finished in a tie for 28th.

FRENCH LICK, Ind. – Two of the greatest names in the history of women’s golf were champions again on Sunday in The Legends Championship, played on the rugged Pete Dye Course at French Lick Resort.

Juli Inkster won the main tournament for players who have passed their 45th birthday. Jan Stephenson took the Super Legends title, an eight-player competition for past stars who have passed their 63rd birthday.

The titles both represented milestones for players who have already achieved so much as LPGA competitors. Inkster won for the first time on the Legends circuit after finishing second in her previous two tournaments. Stephenson, who recently turned 63, triumphed in her first Super Legends event.

Inkster carded a 4-under-par 68 on Sunday, giving her a 36-hole total of 5-under 139 for the tournament and a two-shot win over Trish Johnson. Stephenson, playing from slightly shorter tees, finished even par 144 for the tournament and won by eight over her playing partner, Judy Dickinson.

“Winning can never get old,’’ said Stephenson. “Competing with Juli is impossible for me now, so this was so much fun. And it was really emotional for me. It was for my mom. She passed away earlier in the month.’’

Stephenson debated playing in the more lucrative division, but decided that making her debut in the Super Legends Division made more sense.

“I’ll probably go back and forth, but this was such a hard golf course and it was our big championship,’’ she said. “I really wanted the trophy to jump out of the box. Plus, I had to go back to Australia and didn’t practice. I only arrived back this week. I didn’t feel match-fit.’’

Winning the trophy in her Super Legends debut was a satisfying reward, but Inkster was the big winner. She took home a check for $37,7s00 from the event’s $300,000 purse. Stephenson’s winning check was for $5,000.

Inkster has been focusing on her duties as the U.S. Solheim Cup captain, and she hopes her victory will inspire her team against the Europeans in the upcoming matches in Germany.

“If a 55-year old can win, they can, too,’’ said Inkster. “This has been a tough year, and I’m really tired right now. I have an outing Tuesday in Detroit then I’ll be home for a week.’’

Before the Solheim Cup, however, she’ll take on her LPGA rivals in one of that circuit’s biggest events – the Evian Masters.

Inkster, in the next-to-the-last group, got her game together on the back nine, just in time to hold off Johnson who was playing in the final twosome. They had gone into the final round tied for the lead with Johnson’s playing partner, Dame Laura Davies.

“I wasn’t playing very well on the front side,’’ said Inkster, “but I birdied 13, 15, 17 and 18. That won the tournament for me. I stayed patient and started hitting it a lot better. I had no idea where I was in the tournament. I just tried to keep making birdies. It was good to win. I feel good.’’

The Inkster-Johnson duel came down to the final two holes. Inkster hit the par-4 17th with a 3-wood and 9-iron, setting up a birdie putt. Johnson made birdie behind her. Light rain started to fall as Inkster made her birdie and continued as she played No. 18, a par-5. She got up and down for her final birdie there, then the rain got heavier. That didn’t help Johnson, who three-putted the finishing hole for a bogey.

That handed the title to Inkster, whose 68 was the best round of the day. Pat Hurst, who tied with 2013 champion Lori Kane for third place, shot 69 on Sunday while Johnson posted a 70. Laurie Rinker, the defending champion, made an early run with three birdies on her first eight holes before dropping back. She finished eight strokes back in a tie for 12th.