Confusing double occurrence of Past Perfect in the same sentence

I am currently working with a grammar book designated for advanced English learners, and I have come across a strange usage of Past Perfect:

So, before the young man had had a chance to say anything John had given him an application form.

Since it is clear from the context that one activity had taken place before the other why does past perfect go with both verbs? To me it should go as follows:

So, before the young man had a chance to say anything John had given him an application form.

In your proposed alternative, the remaining past perfect sounds wrong. If you’re going to remove the first, you have to adjust the second too, like so:

So, before the young man had a chance to say anything John gave him an application form.

The reason you might not want to do that is if the relationship of this sentence to a larger context required the past perfect. In that case, you have to put the whole sentence into the appropriate tenses for it to read right.

Nested tenses that orient the reader regarding time and order of actions need to be balanced, else they end up disorienting instead of orienting, much like nested parentheses must be balanced to make sense.