Free Advantage Disadvantage by Yale Jaffe

middle class business owners, factory workers and
city employees populated these neighborhoods.
    Billy had a solid B- grade point and a .250 batting
average in Pony League. He loved sports but never played for his
school’s teams. It was a given from the time he was a toddler that
he would attend college. He limped into a run of the mill state
university for average students like him finally hitting his stride
as a nineteen-year-old college sophomore. Subjects became
interesting, and playing intramurals against like competition
turned out to be fun. While his dorm mates partied at the bars, he
found purpose in the library and at the recreational center. While
working out one day he stumbled on a new way to make expense money
– refereeing basketball and umpiring softball intramural games. The
manager of the campus recreational sports staff offered him a job
after some small talk about sports. He could earn cash for
“watching” sports.
    It was easy for Billy to produce an excellent grade
point average in Political Science, a subject he loved. When his
senior year rolled around, he was not sure what he wanted to do for
a living, so he applied to Law Schools around the Midwest.
Ultimately, he attended DePaul Law School, proud home to alums such
as Benjamin Hooks of the Civil Rights Movement, the father and son
Chicago Mayor duos, and John Stroger of Cook County government
fame. Law school did not come easily to Rechter; he studied nearly
every waking hour to land in the middle of his graduating Jurist
Doctorate classmates. Billy did not head for a lofty Wall Street
Firm, he was lucky to become the in-house counsel for a firm
rehabbing condominium lofts.
    As the years progressed, he honed his craft to
target the burgeoning Windy City real estate market. A twenty-year
building boom allowed him to fly the coup to become a self-employed
practitioner. He mastered his workday responsibilities in a legal
field hardly tied to litigation. Billy had gained much control of
his schedule. He joined the elite East Bank Club in downtown
Chicago and began to play basketball again - not with the ex-Bulls
and collegiate talent that played regularly on Court 1, but with
the other guys – weekend hackers. When he hit forty-years old, his
playing days were numbered and he looked for other ways to compete.
Billy played a lot of golf and tennis, but remained unfulfilled. A
friend suggested that he resume his basketball officiating at the
high school level and he checked into becoming an official.
    The Illinois Interdisciplinary Athletic Association
(IIAA) located itself in the middle of the state, 75 miles south of
Chicago. It began in the late nineteenth century to encourage and
regulate participation in boys’ high school sports. Billy had to
acquire three references for the IIAA application, one of the three
being associated with a school in some way. Recently he helped
close a property sale for the Principal of a local school who
offered to assist. After sending in a small fee, the state
association sent verification cards to each of the three people on
his application. When these verifications came back without
complications, IIAA sent National Federation of High School
basketball books to Billy: Rules, Mechanics, and Case Studies. The
annual take-home test followed shortly. Billy completed one hundred
true/false questions on the test, but many were obscure, picayune,
or subjective. He looked up each question using all three books,
and in this initial process, he began to develop the respect for
officiating that he never felt before.
    Billy contacted a few of the assignment chairpersons
as soon as he received his credentials. He applied the iron-on IIAA
logo to his striped shirt. He had become “patched”. One assigner
with a twelve-school conference appreciated his college recreation
center officiating experience and signed Billy to work a dozen or
so freshman games in the upcoming season. Now scrambling to learn
what else was required