On this day, in 1933, the Organising Committee of the 1936 Berlin Games created a formative landmark for the sport by voting to introduce it to the Olympic programme.

Basketball had featured as a demonstration sport at the sprawling 1904 St Louis Games but had not succeeded in retaining its position in the Olympic framework despite its growing international popularity.

Much of the credit for its final return to the Olympic programme is given to "Phog" Allen, a hugely successful coach of that era at the University of Kansas, whose quiet diplomacy was at odds with the voice which had given him his nickname as it achieved foghorn levels when he operated as a baseball umpire.

Allen had sought to have basketball added as a demonstration sport to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, but to no avail. 

His efforts for the next Games were successful, however, and the International Olympic Committee confirmed its place in the proposed Berlin Games programme in 1934.

In that same year, the United States joined the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) which had been established in 1932 in Geneva.

Happy days. Ish.

Shifting one's gaze awhile from the vexing range of current sporting controversy – VAR, Vaporfly and Alphafly, complex gender and doping issues – it is tempting to hark back to the good old days when sport was pure and unmarred by rancour and division.

Tempting and futile, as such times never existed; but that does not preclude us from finding elements of heart-warming comfort.

In the lead-up to the 1936 Berlin Games, the National Association of Basketball Coaches, which had been created by Allen, collected funds to enable a 74-year-old to make the long sea voyage out to Europe to watch the sport's full Olympic debut.

Between February 9 and 15 more than $5,000 (£3,800/€4,200) was raised through senior, college and high school games throughout the US to endow the Naismith fund. This was created for James Naismith, who in December 1891 invented the game at Springfield YMCA College as a diversion for pupils obliged to play indoors because of persistent New England bad weather.

Naismith, born in Almonte, Ontario, had moved to the US from Canada earlier that year and later founded the basketball programme at the University of Kansas, numbering Allen among his students.

All honour was repaid in 1936 as Naismith, then 74, had the opportunity to watch his sport enter its proper Olympic age in a competition that saw his two most closely-associated nations contest the final.

The Berlin 1936 organisers, despite having the grimly emergent figure of Herr Hitler at their shoulder, got their organising badly wrong in respect of this new sport. They failed to appreciate that it was an indoor game.

So the teams who set the Olympic marker played on outdoor tennis courts within the Imperial Sports Field, on a surface of sand and clay.

On the day of the final it rained heavily, which turned the court into a quagmire that made any cohesive play impossible. One observer likened the spectacle to a water polo match. But there could be no postponement – the Canadians had no leeway on their booked return crossing.

A vivid account of this final, and a multitude of accompanying history, occurs in Canada's Other Game: Basketball from Naismith to Nash, by Brian I. Daley.

The US, spearheaded by the forward duo that Time Magazine had labelled "athletic freaks" – 6ft 9in Willard Schmidt, and 6ft 8in Joe Fortenberry – earned gold with a 19-8 victory, with the latter scoring eight points.

In what was surely the most fitting Olympic medal ceremony in the history of the Games, the medals were presented by the originator of the sport itself. Naismith was reported to have shed a tear during this duty, although it may have been the rain…

Another good thing happened to the bespectacled physician while he was in Berlin – he was voted as Honorary President of the newly emergent FIBA.

Shortly after the Games, Naismith – who died on November 28, 1939 aged 78 – wrote: "There is little doubt that this did much to increase the interest in basketball over the entire world."

So. All good then?

No. Not quite. For as always, the game of sporting politics was continuing in tandem with the sport.

During the tournament, FIBA passed a rule precluding players who were taller than 6ft 3in.

Seriously.

Not surprisingly, the sport's pre-eminent nation, and the only team that would have been affected by this edict – the US – stood to lose the services of three of its squad and objected strongly. FIBA backed down.

So. All good then?

Well not quite.

Naismith was able to sit in on the International Rules Committee that met in Berlin to set the framework for future Olympic competition and was dismayed to see his idea of a centre jump-off after every score – which had been in place even before his final, masterly tweak of disallowing players from running with the ball – abolished.

Next up, the Tall Poppy Syndrome re-emerged as Japan and several European nations ruled that in the next scheduled Games – the 1940 Tokyo Olympics – there would be two classes for the basketball competition. 

Class one would involve teams with players no taller than 6ft 4in and class two would be open to those with players above that height.

It didn't take long for the pfennig to drop. As the only team with players in the taller category, the US would effectively have to enter class one for competition, thus losing its tallest players.

Who knows how that might have turned out, had the proposed 1940 and 1944 Olympics not been put paid to by the Second World War?

As the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr often concluded: "So it goes".