In the end, she merited just a brief paragraph. Debbie Couples, ex-wife of one of most famous golfers in the world, took her own life by jumping seven storeys from the roof of a chapel in Los Angeles. ''She had a history of depression,'' said the coroner's office. So, no need for awkward questions. The case was closed, the bimbo silenced, and hardly a ripple of interest may stir the douce calm of today's tee-off times.

You may remember Debbie Couples. She was the loud one. Loud to the point of being inappropriate, and certainly loud enough to irritate Peter Alliss, which is one of the reasons I always had a soft spot for her. Her exhibitionism first became apparent during the needle Ryder Cup matches in the late eighties and early nineties, when Debbie was there on the sidelines, screaming for her husband, Fred, with alarming intensity. So noisy and demonstrative was she at Kiawah Island, South Carolina, in 1991- running on to the green to

smother him in hugs and kisses - that she passed into golfing legend as the wife from hell. She was one of those American women whom Dirk Bogarde described as having ''smiles like a silent scream''. With the benefit of hindsight, never was a description more accurate.

Some of us saw a woman who was highly emotional and rather pitiful, others simply saw a demented bimbo. No matter that Debbie had given up

her promising career as a tennis

player to nurture Fred, no matter that she spend every minute devoted to being

his nursemaid, bodyguard, manager, banker, bag-packer, and arm candy. No matter that on the American golf circuit, where being blonde, slim, pretty and mindlessly patriotic is a pre-requisite for being a wife, she was blonder, slimmer, prettier and more patriotic than them all. Rule number one for acceptance as a female in the world of male golf is to look good and embarrass no-one.

Wives: a thing of beauty and an expense for ever.

Rule number two is not to do what men do and think you can get away with it. A year after Kiawah, at the 1992 Muirfield Open, Debbie jumped on to a table in a North Berwick hotel in front of two US Ryder Cup teammates and simulated a striptease to the pop classic I'm Too Sexy by Right Said Fred. The devil is in the detail. She was eventually dragged off the table and bundled into a car. Her own personal unravelling in Scotland, however, was as nothing compared to that of Fred, the 1992 US Masters champion who (because of her, it was implied) suffered the ultimate humiliation of missing the cut.

This was far worse than adultery (ask any club handicapper), and so just as he would have chucked out an unsatisfactory set of clubs, Fred divorced Debbie. You win no prizes for guessing that it was messy: you will have read similar greedy bitch stories a million times over. Debbie was portrayed as a profligate monster, lashing out an alleged #100,000 a month on luxuries such as polo. Closer to the nub of the matter, perhaps, was the comment by Fred (who had already found a new girlfriend): ''She stopped being a doting wife.'' But he never stopped to ask why.

How many women will identify

with Debbie's perspective? ''We were together since 1976. Over the years I helped him master his game, to be a world star. When he triumphed, I felt that I had. That's how close we were,'' she said. Once divorced, she was hospitalised with stress and gradually her life went into a pathetic spiral of

self-justification and misjudgment. On alimony of #32,000 a month she set herself up as the sexy face of polo in a suggestive PR campaign for the sport. We do not know whether her depression was exacerbated by drink or drugs, nor should we be interested. By now,

Debbie Couples was cast off. She drowned, as is the way of many ill

people, in slow motion. She had a job, but traces of erratic and inappropriate behaviour began to creep in. She was jailed briefly after resisting arrest over traffic offences, running away, and

hiding from the police.

The male press sided with her

ex-husband, with sports writers demonising her in public: could ever there have been a softer target? As recently as 1995, years after her divorce, one American writer called her a loud-mouth and said she had got far more money than she deserved. I wonder if he feels happy now she's dead.

I wonder how they all feel, the famous golfers who used to kiss her on the cheek and sneer about her when she left the room. I wonder too how her co-bimbos will react: the Stepford wives who wear matching suits and smiles and high heels and sit in rows like obedient dolls for their men. Debbie used to be one of them; now she's Barbie turned Banquo, the unwelcome ghost at the feast, the reminder that their posturing and prettiness are utterly phoney. Debbie didn't just kill herself; she killed the myth of the happy cheerleader.

Right now Sam Torrance's wife is in the process of briefing this year's Ryder Cup wives on how they should behave, what they should wear, how often they should smile. Had she any sense, she would tell the women just to be themselves, and to forget about appearing like some bizarre parody of a chorus line.

We can tell. We can always tell. There was another illuminating moment when the prissy, mannered world of golf revealed some larger truths about human relationships: during the 1995 Ryder Cup, when Nick Faldo's wife, Gill, congratulated him with a warm kiss. In response he gave her the kind of warm, caring hug which you might give an over-friendly leper: and sure enough news soon broke that he was leaving her for a popsy called Brenna (now replaced by yet another popsy, Valerie, whom he is indulging, not with polo ponies, but a #50,000 love temple in his garden).

Top-level sport of any kind, it is said, demands absolute single-mindedness (it doesn't have to be sport; it can be business, art, law, you name it). And the men who get to the top do it by being utterly selfish. Their wives provide an umbilical cord of support, reassurance, and organisation, surviving in their post by successfully subordinating their own needs beneath those of their husbands. Poor old Debbie Couples, however, had needs she could not bury: desperate, emotional needs which Fred could neither understand nor fulfil, so he dumped her like a dodgy putter.

Had it been Couples who had killed himself, we would today be drowning under descriptions of a terrible, shocking tragedy. We need only remember

the acres of space devoted to Payne Stewart's death in an air crash, and the fulsome obituaries. And what of the

21-gun salute, the 21 golfers who lined up to hit a ball off a cliff face in his

memory? These are the sentimental honours accorded only to heroes and to moderate men who die young.

But Debbie's fate, ultimately, was just that brief, passing paragraph. She will remain a forgotten casualty of

the relentlessly ego-driven world of Alpha-male competition, where there is no room for feelings and certainly none for mental illness. If sport is an analogy for life, then poor Debbie's death at the age of 43 is a morality tale which many will choose to ignore. If they remark on it at all.