Jimmy Connors was one of the best American tennis players ever to live. Vitas Gerulaitis, decidedly, was merely good. He had won the Australian Open once, in 1977. But the Lithuanian-American had lost sixteen straight times to Jimmy Connors by 1980, when finally Vitas beat the legend in straight sets.
The media gathered in Madison Square Garden’s press conference room after the match. They waited for the victor to emerge. Sixteen times! they whispered to each other. He took the stage. He took the microphone. He looked each writer in the eye. Slowly.
“And let that be a lesson to you,” he said. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, beats Vitas Gerulaitis seventeen times in a row.”
It remains one of the most memorable quips in professional tennis history. Vitas certainly didn’t mean for the wait for his first victory over his countryman to be so long. And yet delay somehow has this magnifying effect—delay is constructive. Delay builds anticipation, pressure whose release is blissful. Vitas wouldn’t have celebrated his accomplishment as heartily if he’d done it on his first try.
Vitas had no choice, but the Art of Delay is best undertaken purposely. And make no mistake—the Art of Delay is real. J.K. Rowling knows that no climax worth reading about arrives without considerable suspense. Jesus rose from the dead three full days after his crucifixion, proving God indeed has an Italian flair for the dramatic. Soccer referees are taught to hesitate before blowing the whistle for a foul—what if an advantage for the fouled team emerges? I would argue that the World Cup, the Summer Olympics, the presidential elections, graduations like yours from high school and college—all these would not hold us so rapt if we had to wait only one quick year for them instead of four long ones. And no one enters a party fashionably early.
Those, of course, are the professionals in the Art of Delay. We are amateurs when we delay writing our DBQs or our cottage comments until the night before they’re due. Do yourself a favor: Try a constructive delay. Try a purposeful postponement. Many religions preach the benefits of fasting or denying oneself small pleasures. If you’ve always slept in a warm bed, how will you fare outside it? If you’ve never gone hungry, how can you empathize with those who have no choice in the matter?
A real man can delay gratification for the good of his team, or family, or for his own personal growth. A real man is a leader, and a true leader is a man of sacrifice.
“All desires heighten in intensity with the delay of fulfillment,” wrote St. Gregory, “and desire which fades with delay was never desire at all.” Delay of fulfillment is the fire that tests your desire, whatever your desire is. It could be drinking your favorite soda—give it up for a while, and you’ll find your desire diminishing. It could be your love for a woman—you won’t know how strong it really is unless you delay the alluring fulfillments of romance.
The greatest seducers of history and literature—Josephine Bonaparte, the characters of Dangerous Liaisons and the legends of Don Juan—understood St. Gregory well. They would never be caught diving in too fast. They approached indirectly. They made sure much more than physical longing was in place before moving forward. Sex sells, we know that, but the promise of sex—that’s power. That’s power.
I focus on this because your young lives are rife with opportunity. Most of you in the next few years will meet a beautiful young woman. You’ll toil to win her heart. You will win it. Then you’ll want to see if this is the one. You’ll look around and see what everyone is doing, to test compatibility. You’ll move in together and give it a try.
And you couldn’t sabotage your future marriage any better if you tried.
Makes sense. Better to test-drive before you buy, right? How can you know if you can live with this person for the rest of your life if you don’t try it out first?
But statistically, in America, you are more likely to get divorced if you do this, especially in the first few years of marriage. Why? It sounds counterintuitive. But, first, like Vitas the tennis player, you can’t appreciate the benefits of living together as heartily as you would if you’ve had a long, anticipatory wait. Jump right in, and soon those benefits become dull. When you marry, your wedding night becomes like any other. And that is sad.
Second, you think you’ll just break up with her if you’re incompatible, but that becomes tougher when you share an apartment, bills, and a puppy named for the city where you first kissed. It’s often easier to tumble into marriage with someone not quite right for you than to break up at that stage, with all its hassles. Boarding students know full well: Moving is not easy.
And self-induced delays have a way of strengthening the exact traits required to be successful in marriage—sacrifice for each other, forgiveness, self-discipline. Get what you want right away, and you forfeit the opportunity to develop these virtues. You enter marriage unarmed.
Let’s be honest. Cohabitation, what we call living together before marriage, is enticing. Very enticing. You get all the perks of marriage without the commitment. You come home to and wake up next to the woman of your dreams. For a selfish man, that sounds awesome. But he is an amateur in the Art of Delay. He doesn’t see that the love between him and his girlfriend would intensify with delay of fulfillment. His relationship will never be as intense as it could have been. He doesn’t see that a trial run with escape clauses is no way to prepare for a life spent in selfless devotion to his family, come what may. He is conditioned to run for the hills at the first shot.
I am not wasting your time. I am not proselytizing. The decisions you make about marriage are closer than you think. I have an old picture of my father, a football player at Bucknell, holding me in his arms. The Bison mascot is jumping in the background. In the photo he is as old as the seniors in this very chapel.
This very school is living proof of how important it is to get these decisions right. Our original mission was to educate fatherless children. This chapel was built a hundred years ago with many of you in mind. It was built for me. Your own children will depend on your decisions on matters like cohabitation. You must do everything in your power to serve them well.
Our country needs strong families. Cicero knew it two thousand years ago every bit as much as politicians know it today; society is as cohesive as its families. And strong families need strong men like you—who can apply the Art of Delay in their dating lives and marriages.
If you have character enough to undertake the challenge, you’ll find it’s like that most American of delays—the rain delay at a ballpark. You don’t know how long you’ll wait. Drizzle could become downpour. You may have to come back tomorrow. But like every day of your life that you’ve waited for, every day you’ve counted down the days to, eventually, as it always does, it comes. Baseball comes.
It stops raining. The tarp comes off. And you see how glorious the infield is.
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