For Sergio Garcia, next week's Masters becomes even more important after he was joint-second with a round to play and dropped five strokes in the first five holes of the Players Championship at Sawgrass last weekend.

Brilliantly though Stephen Ames won the title by six shots from Retief Goosen, his task became a lot easier after Garcia's slump.

The 26-year-old Spaniard finished only 14th with a 78 - the fifth time in five United States Tour events this year that he has been over par in the final round.

"I played pretty, pretty badly," Garcia said. "On Sundays, my good shots seem to be bad and my bad shots are bad."

Only 32 days after being demolished by Tiger Woods, Ames had the biggest win of his career. The Trinidad-born 41-year-old, runner-up in 2002 and crushed by Woods by a record 9&8 margin at the Match Play Championship last month, claimed the £862,275 title for only his second win in more than 200 events on the US Tour - a circuit he was banned from playing in for a while because of visa problems.

Goosen, round in 69, was himself three strokes clear of third-placed quartet Jim Furyk, Pat Perez, Camilo Villegas and Swede Henrik Stenson. World No 2 Singh slumped to a 77 for eighth place.

Meanwhile, Greg Owen and Ian Poulter saw their Masters' hopes fade away with rounds of 73 and 75 respectively.

Ames, meanwhile, had been denied this event four years ago when New Zealander Craig Perks chipped in twice in the last three holes.

But, accompanied by his brother Robert as his caddie, Ames gave the most polished display of his life.

He moved four clear with a superb outward 34 before hitting trouble on the 424-yard tenth.

On the edge of a bunker in two, he failed to get out first time and double-bogeyed. It sliced his advantage in half but the response was superb - a two-putt birdie at the long 11th, then a tee shot to two feet on the 13th, where Fred Couples had earlier made the fourth hole-in-one of the week.

That put him five clear and even when he had to chop out of the rough on the dangerous 14th he made a 15-footer for par and followed that with a nine-foot birdie putt.

He just carried the lake at the long 16th but from the fringe rolled in a 25-footer for eagle.

His win comes eight months after his wife Jodie - Canadian just as Ames is himself now - had three-quarters of one lung removed following the discovery of cancer.

Garcia's last three final rounds at Sawgrass have been 77, 78 and 78 - his worst three scores since his debut in 2000 with an 82.

Although he missed the halfway cut at Augusta last year, in 2004 he was fourth after a closing 66. He was second to Woods at the 1999 US PGA.

He remains Europe's highest-ranked player at sixth in the world but his left-hand-below-right putting method needs work on it. But that is not all. On Sunday he went from deep rough into water for a double-bogey six on the fourth. With Garcia falling back, Swede Henrik Stenson was leading European - earning almost £230,000 for joint-third slot.

Ames, meanwhile, might not even go to Augusta, with his two sons on spring holiday from their school and Jodie recovering from surgery.