At last! Sergio García ended a three-year drought by winning The Players Championship on a wild and windy day in northeast Florida. It was the biggest victory of the 28-year-old Spaniard’s career and a reminder that he had lost the Open in a play-off last July. It was also fair reward for the imperiousness of his driving and a pat on the back for the new putting stroke he has been working on with Stan Utley, the renowned short-game coach.

It took a one-hole sudden-death play-off for García to beat an American journeyman, Paul Goydos, 43, who had led by three strokes with six holes to play. On the 17th hole, the first extra hole, Goydos’s ball caught a gust of wind and fell into the water no more than six feet short of the putting surface. García aimed at the middle of this near-island green, found it and his ball rolled to seven feet from the flagstick. García’s victory in a play-off at this hole was an echo of Sandy Lyle’s triumph in 1987, the last and only time a European had won this prestigious event and it came at the same hole.

“Sergio deserved it,” Goydos said gracefully. “He played the best all week. Look at the statistics. They prove it.”

Drive for show and putt for dough is one of the oldest clichés in golf; all week García had driven magnificently. Yesterday, the world No 18 putted for the dough — and won it, all $1.7 million (about £900,000) of it.

García had to confront his putting demons on the 72nd hole, needing to sink a putt of five feet for a par and a sub-par round of 71. He did so and clenched his left fist in a gesture of triumph. Goydos, playing in the group behind García, held a one-stroke lead when he came off his 71st hole but then he hit a poor approach from the middle of the 18th fairway and missed the putt from ten feet for a 74.

Though García had missed a three-foot putt on the 1st, the Spaniard looked much happier on the greens than in previous days. Three strokes behind Goydos on the 10th, García holed a six-footer after being in a bunker on the 11th and stroked home a 15-footer on the 12th to close to within one stroke, only for Goydos to birdie the same hole.

It was as testing and nerve-racking an afternoon as the golfers could have coped with. Winds gusting up to 40mph made the already difficult Stadium course into something close to unplayable. The wind blew the ball of Nicholas Thompson 40 feet across the 17th green, for example.

Bernhard Langer’s challenge slipped away from him. Two under at the start of the day, he got to three under twice before finding that either fatigue or the difficulty of the course or both had got to him. Langer had lit up the event with a 67 on Friday when his play belied his age — he will be 51 in August — but it was probably his age that did for him at the end.

Ernie Els played the sort of up and down golf that marked his play in the previous rounds. Having begun the day one over par, eight strokes behind Goydos, Els holed one bunker stroke for an eagle on the 11th and nearly another a couple of holes later. At that stage the South African had got himself under par and he moved nearer to the leaders when he birdied the 16th and the difficult 17th. But then the 18th, which had proved so difficult all day, claimed Els as its latest victim. The world No 4 ran up a six on the 18th, by no means the highest score of the day — that belonged to Richard Sterne, who had a nine — and fell back to one over par after a 72.