there she went , the woman of his dreams : the rich girl whose family had paid the tuition for weathering preparatory academy without even noticing , when he 'd had to scrape and beg for every scholarship he could find , the athlete who could have gone to the olympics , when he treasured his three minutes of actual varsity playing time on the high school basketball team , the professor of political science whose father halfway ran the country , when he struggled every day to get government sources to talk to him .