First it was Elmhurst’s Mark Wilson winning two of the first three full-field events of the PGA Tour season. Then it was University of Illinois alum D.A. Points capturing the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Now still another local golfer has come to the forefront.

Luke Donald, who graduated from Northwestern in 1999 and has maintained strong Chicago ties, won the biggest tournament of the season so far on Sunday with a dominating performance at the Accenture Match Play Championship near Tucson, Ariz.

Donald, playing in only his second tournament of the year, whipped Germany’s Martin Kaymer, the world’s No. 1-ranked player, 3 and 2 in the final. Kaymer was Donald’s sixth victim in the five-day event. Donald never trailed in any match. He played only 73 holes en route to winning his six matches, none of which went to the 18th hole. Along the way he made 32 birdies.

“It was a long time since I won in the U.S., and to beat the top 63 players in the world was gratifying,” said Donald. “It was an amazing week.”

That is was.

Donald, born in England, won in the U.S. for the first time since taking the 2006 Honda Classic. He’ll be in the field when that event tees off on Thursday in Orlando, Fla.

In 2010 Donald, in addition to playing in the Ryder Cup matches, became a father for the first time, won at Madrid on the European PGA Tour and finished in the top 10 in 14 of his 28 tournaments world-wide. No golfer won more money than Donald in 2010, if his winnings in both the U.S. and Europe are combined.

That busy season led to Donald taking 11 weeks off, his longest break in seven years. His first tournament of this season, the Northern Trust Open in Los Angeles, ended quickly when he shot 79 in the second round to miss the cut. There was no carryover last week in the first of the four World Golf Championship events, which draw international fields and rank just below the four major tournaments in importance.

Though it was played on a 7,800-yard course, and Donald isn’t one of golf’s longer hitters, he was barely challenged in his matches. The victory lifted him from No. 9 in the world all the up to No. 3.

“ Whether I deserve to be No. 3 in the world, I don’t know,” said Donald. “But certainly in terms of my work ethic and wanting it, then I do deserve it. I’ve been very diligent about working on my short game. There’s room for improvement with my game off the tee and some of my iron play, if you look at my statistics, but I make up for it around the greens.”

Donald and his wife Diane, who also attended Northwestern, have a residence in Orlando but still consider Chicago their home. Their daughter Elle celebrated her first birthday while Luke was en route to winning at Tucson and Pat Goss, his head coach at NU, has remained Donald’s swing coach since he turned pro in 2001.

Prior to Sunday Donald’s most prominent move into U.S. tournament contention came at the 2006 PGA Championship at Medinah. He was paired with eventual winner Tiger Woods in the final group on Sunday but shot 74 and finished tied for third.

“It was interesting to see how (Woods) worked his way around the golf course. He was always in control of his game and didn’t push things,” said Donald. “He made other people make mistakes. That’s what I learned watching Tiger. You don’t have to do anything too spectacular. You just have to do things pretty well.”

Rarely does a golfer have a chance to make history — really significant history — in a specific tournament. Steve Stricker has that opportunity when the John Deere Classic comes to TPC at John Deere Run in Silvis.

Stricker won the JDC in 2009 and 2010. Only 20 players in the history of the PGA Tour have won an event three straight years, the last being Tiger Woods who took the Bridgestone Invitational in 2005-07. Stricker’s chance for a three-peat comes July 7-10, but he’ll be the most closely-watched player in a strong field as soon as the players start gathering at TPC at John Deere Run for practice rounds on the Fourth of July.

The world’s No. 4-ranked player at the time of this printing, Stricker has had his great moments before. Most interesting is that he was the PGA Tour’s comeback player-of-the-year twice — and in successive years to boot. His has been a unique career since coming out of the University of Illinois.

After leading the Illini to the 1988 Big Ten title Stricker has virtually had two pro careers. He won big early on, then went into a deep slump before coming back to become one of the game’s top stars in his 40s.

“It’s been a great 5 1/2-year ride, this turn-around,” he admitted. “I keep pinching myself at times.”

In addition to his successes in the Quad Cities, Stricker’s 10 PGA Tour victories include the 1996 Western Open at Cog Hill and this year’s Memorial tourney.

Win or lose, Stricker is one of golf’s class acts. he showed that again after winning the Memorial. He didn’t get back to Madison until about 1 a.m. the Sunday of his triumph and was due for media duties at TPC at John Deere Run at 10 a.m. the following morning. Stricker, with a daughter keeping him company, made the three-hour drive in plenty of time and then discussed his golfing life in full.

He hasn’t won a major championship yet — he barely made the cut at the U.S. Open at Congressional — so a three-peat in the JDC would be his crowning achievement so far.

“It’s going to be fun,” Stricker said at the tourney’s media day in June. “I enjoy the course. It has the same bentgrass I grew up on. Once you have success, you get good vibes when you come back. I have good feelings going around this course. I’d very much like to win it three times.”

And, it could happen. Stricker knows, though, that it won’t be easy.

“It’s difficult to two-peat, much less put three together,” he said. “The expectation level is high when you win and then come back. When your shots don’t fall into place you might lose a bit of confidence, and then you have more demands on your time when you come back. People look at you more, but there’s a ton of other good players. A lot of things have to fall in place.”

Last year’s win was an epic. The 2010 JDC was a tourney like no other on the PGA Tour — and that’s saying a lot.

In the first round Paul Goydos posted a 59, only the fourth player to break 60 in an official event. But Stricker nearly matched him with a 60 later in the day. Imagine two scores of that magnitude on the same day, on the same course!

“It was cool, the whole thing that transpired last year,” said Stricker. “It had to feel weird for (Goydos) — to shoot 59 and just lead by one. (His own 60) made me feel like I was right back in it. I would think it was harder for him to swallow than it was for me.”

Goydos didn’t fold. He was Stricker’s main challenger at the end, but Stricker’s numbers were way too good. Over the first 54 holes he made birdies on 27. His 25-under-par status was a PGA Tour record for three rounds and his 26-under 258 for the full 72 holes was a tournament record by four strokes. In his last eight rounds at TPC at John Deere Run, encompassing his two victories, Stricker is 46 under par.

There’s much more to worth knowing about Steve Stricker, though, than just those spectacular numbers. They did, however, help him become the top-ranked American golfer and a solid threat to eventually become No. 1 if Luke Donald, Lee Westwood and Martin Kaymer falter. Stricker isn’t focusing on the rankings, though.

“I was No. 2 for awhile,” he said. “Me being the highest-ranked American makes me want to text Tiger and ask him, What happened?’ But I don’t have the courage to do that yet.”

Stricker was only joking about chiding Woods. They’re friends, but Woods’ recent struggles have helped Stricker and plenty of other players enhance their profiles.

“You call me under-appreciated?” grinned Stricker, when asked about the impact Woods’ much-discussed problems have had on golf in general. “Tiger and Phil (Mickelson) are still the biggest draws in golf. You can’t take that away from them. They provide a lot of excitement, and I still tune into golf to see how Tiger and Phil are playing. It was good when Tiger was winning because people wanted to see that, but (Woods’ troubles) have given other guys confidence. Now they know that anybody could win.”

In those days when Woods was winning big Stricker was struggling. He had to do some soul-searching, and lots of hard work, before his game returned. What’s most unusual is that he did the bulk of the work in Madison, Wis., beating balls in the winter at a heated driving range instead of seeking the warmth of Florida or other warm-weather climates. Stricker grew up in Edgerton, Wis., which is near Madison, and his wife and former caddie Nikki is from Madison. Her father, Dennis Tiziani, was the golf coach at the University of Wisconsin when Stricker was playing for Illinois.

`Before we had kids we tried (the warm-weather areas), but after the kids we decided it’d be better to come home with family and friends,” said Stricker. “Plus, being (in Wisconsin) gets me just far enough away from the game when I need that.”

He doesn’t feel the changing Midwest climate has hurt his golf career.

“I had played with kids from the South who aren’t around anymore,” said Stricker, “and I have the feeling they just had enough of it. There’s only so much one can do with anything, be it a job or a sport. Living in the Midwest might not be for everybody, but we’ve (Luke Donald, Mark Wilson, D.A. Points, Jerry Kelly) showed we can handle that.”

Stricker’s goal isn’t to become the world’s No. 1 golfer. He “just” wants to win a major title. He even said after his second JDC win that he didn’t want to be No. 1 because of the added attention he’d receive.

“I don’t want that. To win a major is at the top of my list, and my number of opportunities seems to be dwindling with my age,” he said. “But (winning a major and dealing with the added attention) would be a good tradeoff.”

First order of business, though, is to get his three-peat at the JDC, which will carry a $4.5 million prize fund and one of its strongest fields ever this year. Eight PGA Tour winners from 2011 will try to halt Stricker’s streak — Jonathan Byrd, Mark Wilson, Jhonny Vegas, Points, Johnson Wagner, Michael Bradley, Brendan Steele and Keegan Bradley. So will Jason Day, the runner-up in the Masters.

Winners of the last two British Opens — Louis Oosthuizen and Stewart Cink — are entered along with two former British champs in Todd Hamilton and John Daly. The past JDC winners competing again include Kenny Perry (2008), John Senden (2006), Mark Hensby (2004) and J.P. Hayes (2002).

Oh, yes, Goydos will be back, too. Wouldn’t it be something to see a repeat of the Stricker-Goydos shootout of a year ago?

Could Illinois suddenly be emerging as a hotbed for PGA Tour players? That seems unlikely, but look what happened in the first few weeks of the PGA Tour and Senior PGA Tour seasons.

Mark Wilson, an Elmhurst resident, won the Sony Open in Hawaii in the PGA Tour’s first full-field tournament of 2011, then captured the Waste Management Phoenix Open in his third start.

Wilson, who wanted to keep playing, ran out of gas in his next tournament — the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Still, no problem.

D.A. Points, raised in Pekin and a collegiate star at the University of Illinois, won his first PGA Tour event at Pebble Beach. Not only did he win the pro event, he teamed with comedian Bill Murray, who grew up in Wilmette, to capture the pro-am division.

And then there was Jeff Sluman. The long-time Burr Ridge resident was at the top of the leaderboard in the Champions Tour’s Allianz Championship in Boca Raton, Fla., until Tom Lehman rolled in a birdie putt on the final green. Sluman wound up as the runner-up on the same day that Points and Murray celebrated their victories.

When the dust had cleared Wilson, off his two victories, and Points stood one-two in the FedEx Cup standings, making them — at the moment — the front-runners for the $10 million bonus that’ll be paid out after the PGA Tour’s playoff series concludes in October.

Wilson shot three 72s and missed the cut at Pebble Beach, but he’ll likely be heard from again. He committed to the eight tournaments that immediately followed his win at Phoenix. And both he and Points qualified for their first Masters appearance in April.

So, chances of both being heard from again soon appear good.

“I see the snowstorm in Chicago and it’s like, why go back there?” Wilson said after beating Jason Dufner in a two-hole Monday playoff at TPC Scottsdale. “There’s no reason. I’m just enjoying the ride, and I’ll ride this train as long as I can.”

Wilson, 36, earned his first berth in April’s Masters with his victory in Hawaii and his second win got him into the World Match Play Championship as well as a World Golf Championship stop at Doral in Miami. Getting into those big money events drastically changed Wilson’s schedule..

“I’ll play through Bay Hill, then take the week off before the Masters,” he said.

Two of the other stops before the Masters are the Honda Classic, which Wilson won in 2007, and the Mayakoba Classic, which he won in 2009. Those were Wilson’s only PGA Tour wins prior to his explosion in the last three weeks.

Wilson grew up in Menominee Falls, Wis., and is an avid Packers’ fan. But he and his wife Amy settled in the Chicago area several years ago. The couple and their two young children, Lane and Cole, are enjoying life on the road now but when he’s not on tour he practices regularly at Cog Hill in Lemont.

Both of Wilson’s recent wins came in tournaments with schedule difficulties. He needed to play 36 holes on the final day in Hawaii and frost delays created a rare Monday finish in Phoenix. Because of the frost he played four holes on Thursday, 28 on Friday, four on Saturday, 30 on Sunday and six (two in the playoff) on Monday.

A nine-foot birdie putt enabled Wilson to finish off Dufner, a champion in Chicago in 2006 when he won the Nationwide Tour’s LaSalle Bank Open at The Glen Club. The win hoisted Wilson’s world ranking from 91 to 51. He ended last season as No. 230.

The Packers’ run to the Super Bowl was a distraction during his win at Phoenix.

“The saddest thing was that I couldn’t watch the first half,” said Wilson, who played until dark on Sunday. Still, he had a green and gold visor made up especially for Super Bowl week and also wore a “Cheese-head” hat during breaks between tournament rounds.

Points, meanwhile, has deeper Illinois roots.

“I grew up on the 17th hole of the local country club in (Pekin) Illinois and both my parents played and taught me the game,” he told the media in California. “To win on the PGA Tour, especially at Pebble Beach with Bill Murray — I don’t think I could even dream it up.”

The key to Points’ win came at the 14th hole of the final round, when he holed a 107-yard gap wedge for eagle. Playing with the always-clowning Murray was no problem.

“Everybody all week kept saying `you got the short end of the stick playing with Murray, He’s so crazy,”’ said Points. “I never felt that way. I kept think, why does everyone get so worked up thinking he’s this big distraction? I tried to embrace it.”

Now it’s North Shore’s turn.

The Western Golf Assn. is now in the third year of its new policy of playing its Western Amateur championship at Chicago courses. After a 28-year run at Michigan’s Point O’ Woods the WGA took the Western Am to Conway Farms, in Lake Forest , in 2009 and Skokie, in Glencoe, in 2010.

History-wise, North Shore — which will host the tourney from Aug. 1-6 — is very much similar to Skokie. Both hosted long-ago U.S. Opens, Skokie in 1922 when Gene Sarazen was the champion and North Shore in 1933 when Johnny Goodman became the last amateur to win that coveted title. North Shore also hosted the 1928 Western Open (a brothers’ duel in which Abe Espinosa beat Al) and the U.S. Amateurs of 1939 (won by Marvin “Bud” Ward) and 1983 (won by Jay Sigel).

Like Skokie, North Shore underwent a renovation long after the respected British firm of Colt, MacKenzie and Allison did the original design work for the course’s opening in 1924. Rick Jacobson, the Libertyville architect who caddied at North Shore in the 1970s, played the pivotal role in the club’s Strategic Presentation Plan that began in 1994.

The change in venue doesn’t mean much to defending champion David Chung, a Stanford University senior from Fayetteville, N.C.

“I don’t mind coming back to a different course at all,” said Chung. “It levels the playing field, having limited knowledge of the course. I don’t know much about North Shore, but I have heard it’s a demanding course similar to Skokie. The way I see it, if you’re playing the best golf in the field you win — no matter which course the tournament is on.”

Well said, but Chung is a different player this time around. He’s more seasoned, for one thing. After his win at Skokie Chung went all the way to the final of the U.S. Amateur before losing to Peter Uihlien. The runner-up showing got Chung into the Masters, but he didn’t survive the 36-hole cut. He did, however, post a scorching round on his school’s home course later on, tying the Stanford course record with a 61.

But, though, he’s more battle-tested, Chung isn’t swinging the same — on purpose. Despite his success over the last two seasons he decided to undergo a swing change in an effort to better prepare him for the PGA Tour.

“The professional game is different than the college game in that it rewards a different sort of player,” explained Chung. “The college player can definitely compete with the pros when he’s playing well, and can even win on tour. However, where the pro is different is that his game is more mature. He’s more consistent day in and day out and always has control of the golf ball….I’m working to maximize my control and distance by increasing my torque on my backswing and having more unity between my body and arms on my downswing. Basically I”m swinging in more of a `together’ motion.”

Regardless of how he’s swinging, Chung will have to be at his best to win the title again. As usual, the Western field is loaded — and this one may be even more so than most years. The early entries include No. 1-ranked amateur Uihlein, Kent State’s John Hahn who won the Western Am at Conway Farms and Patrick Rodgers, Chung’s freshman teammate. Rodgers won the Western Junior last year and could defend that title since he would still be 19 by tournament time. Rodgers, though, opted to skip his title defense to play at North Shore.

Geography-wise that’s not a big difference for Rodgers. For the first time since 1928 the WGA is playing all three of its championships in the Chicago area, so he’d be coming to Chicago anyway. The Junior will be played at Beverly and the PGA Tour’s BMW Championship returns to Cog Hill.

Also teeing it up at North Shore will be Russell Henley, a University of Georgia golfer who won the Stadion Classic on the Nationwide Tour this year, and Scott Langley, the 2010 NCAA champion for Illinois. For some local flavor there’s Vince India, the Illinois Amateur champion from Deerfield and Big Ten player-of-the-year for Iowa.

Frequently dubbed “the Masters of amateur golf,” the Western Am is a grueling test. It begins with the entire field playing two rounds of stroke play competition, then the low 44 and ties go 36 more on Day 3 to decide the 16 qualifiers for the match play portion of the tournament.

The Western’s “Sweet 16” have included some great talents over the years. Twenty-nine of the last 35 PGA Tour players-of-the-year were “Sweet 16” qualifiers. So were 12 of the top 20 on the PGA’s career money list. Twenty-eight went on to win major championships.

The very select batch that went on to win Western Am titles include Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Ben Crenshaw, Justin Leonard, Phil Mickelson, Curtis Strange, Hal Sutton, Lanny Watkins and Tom Weiskopf.