Gordon Whitted came up out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina - the Forsyth County city in the Piedmont region of the state best known for its R.J. Reynolds tobacco heritage, the Wake Forest University campus that has been in town since the 1956 relocation from Wake Forest NC, and the cluster of competitive high school basketball programs that have, across the postwar decades, produced a steady stream of Division I players. The Tobacco Road basketball culture of North Carolina ran through Winston-Salem the way it ran through Durham and Chapel Hill and Greensboro. Gordon Whitted, by his senior year of high school in the late 1970s, was a 6'2" guard with the kind of court vision and shooting profile that drew a Duke recruiting visit from the Bill Foster staff.
Duke had been one of the dominant ACC programs of the late 1970s under Bill Foster - Final Four in 1978, Elite Eight in 1980. The Foster staff had built much of the program's identity around recruiting the Carolinas and the broader Tobacco Road region. Larry Linney, another Winston-Salem native who was three years older than Whitted, had signed with Duke in 1977 and was, by the time Whitted was being recruited, an upperclassman on the Duke roster. Gordon Whitted signed with Duke for fall 1980. By the time he arrived in Durham that October, Bill Foster was gone - departed for South Carolina the summer after his Elite Eight run. The new Duke head coach was Mike Krzyzewski, the thirty-three-year-old hired by Tom Butters in March 1980. Whitted was a Foster recruit walking into the Coach K era. Larry Linney was still on the roster as the senior. The two Winston-Salem NC players were the bookends of the Duke roster pipeline that connected the Foster era to the Coach K era - the senior who had played his entire Duke career under Foster, and the freshman who would play his entire Duke career under K.