Road to Duke
Greg Wendt came up out of Livonia, Michigan, the western Detroit suburb where Wayne County's middle-class families lived in the postwar ranch houses along Five Mile Road and Plymouth Road. By the spring of 1981 he was a senior at Detroit Catholic Central High School in nearby Novi, and he was one of the highest-rated basketball recruits in the entire state of Michigan. Born in Detroit on January 30, 1963, he was a 6'6" Catholic-school multi-sport athlete on track for a Division I scholarship. He had been a three-year varsity player at CC. He had won All-Catholic, All-Metro, and All-State honors as a sophomore, as a junior, and again as a senior. In his senior year he had added a Dream Team All-State selection and a Catholic School All-American honor to the list. He had graduated from Catholic Central as the basketball program's all-time leading scorer - both for his career and for his best single season. The Detroit basketball establishment ranked him sixth in the Michigan 1980-81 Mr. Basketball voting, the year Sam Vincent of Lansing Eastern won with 587 votes ahead of future NBA player Eric Turner of Flint Central in second with 573. Greg Wendt was sixth on a Michigan Mr. Basketball ballot that included a future NBA starting point guard and a future NBA second-round draft pick. He was also a CC baseball star - a first baseman and a pitcher who had been part of the 1979 Catholic Central baseball state championship team.
The recruiter who landed him was a thirty-four-year-old former West Point assistant who had just finished his first season as the head basketball coach at Duke University, an ACC also-ran in 1980-81 that had gone 17-13 and finished fourth in the conference. Mike Krzyzewski was, in the spring of 1981, putting together the recruiting class that he hoped would resurrect the Duke basketball program. Krzyzewski's first recruiting class as Duke's head coach - the 1981 class, the class that arrived a full year before the Godfather Class of 1982 - was anchored by Greg Wendt of Detroit Catholic Central. Wendt signed with Duke. He arrived in Durham in August 1981 a Catholic School All-American 6'6" Detroit kid who would, the next October, become one of the first true Coach K recruits to walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium as a freshman.
At Duke
Greg Wendt's freshman year at Duke, 1981-82, was Mike Krzyzewski's second season at Duke. The team finished 10-17, last in the ACC at 3-11. It was the bottom of the Coach K bottom - the season that, combined with the 11-17 1982-83 follow-up, would lead the Duke big-money boosters to openly plan Coach K's ouster. The 1981-82 Duke team did not have the Godfather Class yet - the Godfather Class would arrive the next October. The 1981-82 Duke team had Greg Wendt as its 6'6" Detroit freshman role player.
The freshman line Wendt produced in 1981-82 was the most substantial line of any first-year Coach K recruit at Duke prior to the Godfather Class. He played in twenty-three of the team's twenty-seven games. He started four of them - one of the few true freshman starting roles Coach K would give in his first three Duke seasons. He averaged 12.2 minutes per appearance, 3.6 points per game on 44.7 percent shooting, and 2.4 rebounds per game. He totaled eighty-two points and fifty-six rebounds across the season. He was a freshman who could play in the ACC. He had been recruited as a long-term cornerstone of the Coach K rebuild. He had earned starting minutes in his first year on a team that was, around him, learning what it meant to play for the new head coach.
The next year, 1982-83, was a different season for Wendt. The Godfather Class arrived in October 1982 - Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, David Henderson, Jay Bilas, Weldon Williams, and Bill Jackman. The wing minutes Coach K had used to be giving Greg Wendt as a freshman were now the wing minutes Coach K was giving Johnny Dawkins, the future Naismith Player of the Year. Wendt's role collapsed. He played in twenty-one games as a sophomore, started zero of them, averaged just 4.1 minutes per appearance, attempted 26 shots from the floor (making 7), and scored 21 total points for the season. The Duke team around him went 11-17, finished last in the ACC again at 3-11, and lost 109-66 to Virginia in the 1983 ACC Tournament - the most humiliating loss of Coach K's young Duke career. Coach K was on the hottest hot seat of his life. The Godfather Class freshmen who would, three years later, take Duke to the 1986 national title game were still freshmen. Greg Wendt was a sophomore whose freshman starting role had been replaced by a McDonald's All-American.
He requested his transfer release after the 1982-83 season. Per the Duke Basketball Report retrospectives that have catalogued every Coach K transfer, Greg Wendt and Bill Jackman are the two foundational transfers of the Coach K era - the two early high-profile recruits who left after the 1983 season as the program approached its lowest moment. The two transfers tell different stories. Bill Jackman left to be near his widowed mother in Grant, Nebraska. Greg Wendt left to play. He wanted to be on the floor. He decided to transfer back home to Detroit, to the University of Detroit Mercy, where the playing time was waiting.
After Duke
Greg Wendt sat out the 1983-84 season as a transfer, the standard NCAA penalty. He returned to the basketball court for the University of Detroit Mercy Titans in the fall of 1984 as a junior. The Detroit Mercy program he was joining had, two years earlier, played its 1982 home finale in front of approximately eight hundred fans and had been actively considering dropping down to NCAA Division III or eliminating basketball altogether. Wendt was about to be part of the revival. As a junior in 1984-85, he averaged starters' minutes and earned All-Midwestern Collegiate City honors. As a senior in 1985-86, he was named team captain, the team's second-leading scorer per the Mitch Albom column the Detroit Free Press would publish that winter, and All-Midwestern Collegiate Conference. He was named All-Conference twice across his Detroit Mercy career.
The Mitch Albom Detroit Free Press column, written in the middle of the Detroit Mercy first-place run during Wendt's senior year, asked the Duke transfer the question that hung over his decision two years earlier. Wendt's answer, paraphrased into the Albom prose: enthusiasm was coming back to Detroit Mercy; if he had stayed at Duke he would be on Wall Street or somewhere by now; he liked it at Detroit Mercy; he was getting to play. The Wall Street line, in retrospect, was prophetic. Three years later Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, David Henderson, and Jay Bilas would all be NBA players or, in Bilas's case, an overseas player on his way to Duke Law School and the ESPN broadcast booth. The kids Wendt had spent his sophomore year being passed by were, by the late 1980s, the foundational starters and reserves of Coach K's first Final Four era. Greg Wendt, by his own framing in the Albom column, would have been in a Brooks Brothers suit at a New York investment bank. Instead, he was a Detroit Mercy senior captain helping rebuild a Division I program that had nearly folded three years earlier.
Across his complete college career - the two Duke seasons and the two Detroit Mercy seasons - Wendt played in 101 games, averaged 9.4 points and 4.9 rebounds and 1.9 assists, shot 47.7 percent from the floor, and finished as a 6'6" wing whose body had matured into a 215-pound college senior. The 1986 NBA Draft, held on June 17, 1986 at the Felt Forum in New York, included sixty-one rounds of selections across twenty-three NBA teams. The Boston Celtics, who had just won the 1986 NBA Championship two days earlier against the Houston Rockets behind Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson, and Danny Ainge, used their 6th-round pick - the 139th overall selection - on Greg Wendt of Detroit Mercy. The Celtics that day also drafted, in the 5th round, Dave Colbert of Bowling Green; in the 7th round, Tom Ivey of Wabash. In the early rounds of the same 1986 draft, the San Antonio Spurs took Johnny Dawkins 10th overall and the Denver Nuggets took Mark Alarie 18th overall. Greg Wendt's name was on the same NBA draft list as the four classmates whose arrival at Duke in October 1982 had pushed him out of his role. He did not make the Celtics roster. The 1986 draft was the end of his playing basketball career.
Where Is He Now
Greg Wendt's life in the years since the 1986 NBA Draft is, in the open record of public sources, less documented than his playing career. What is documented, decisively, is the recognition his alma mater high school chose to give him three decades after his playing career ended. In 2016, the Detroit Catholic Central High School Hall of Fame inducted Greg Wendt, Class of 1981, for his accomplishments as a three-year varsity basketball player and a member of the 1979 baseball state championship team. The Hall of Fame bio they prepared for the induction is the document of record on his Catholic Central career and the documentary backbone of his story: the all-time leading scorer in CC basketball history, the Catholic School All-American, the Dream Team All-State selection, the Duke scholarship, the two seasons under Coach K, the transfer to Detroit Mercy, the All-Conference team captain years, and the 1986 Boston Celtics draft. The Hall of Fame plaque hangs today in the Detroit Catholic Central trophy case alongside the plaques of NBA player Tom LaGarde (CC Class of 1973), Michigan Speaker of the House Andy Dillon (Class of 1980), and the other CC athletic legends.
The Brotherhood, as Greg Wendt has lived it, is the foundational version of the Brotherhood that left before the program won. He was Coach K's first major recruit - the Detroit kid who arrived in October 1981 as a Catholic School All-American whose 1981-82 freshman line of 12.2 minutes per game on four starts was, at the time, the most substantial Coach K-recruited freshman season in Duke history. He was a sophomore who watched the Godfather Class take his minutes. He was, alongside Bill Jackman, one of the two foundational Coach K transfers whose departures after the 1982-83 season were, in the long Duke Basketball Report retrospectives that have catalogued every K-era roster move, the two first significant chapters of the Coach K transfer ledger. He left Durham. He went home to Detroit. He helped revive a Detroit Mercy program that had nearly folded. He was a two-time All-Conference team captain. He was drafted by the 1986 NBA Champion Boston Celtics.
He was, in the line Mitch Albom captured in the Detroit Free Press column during the U-D first-place run of his senior year, a 22-year-old who acknowledged that if he had stayed at Duke he would have been on Wall Street. The Brotherhood, as Greg Wendt has lived it, is the version of the Brotherhood that prefers a Detroit Mercy team captaincy and a Boston Celtics draft pick to a Final Four bench seat. The Detroit Catholic Central Hall of Fame plaque records the choice the right way: it records the high school all-time scoring record, the Catholic School All-American honor, the Duke scholarship, the Detroit Mercy revival, the Celtics draft. The Hall of Fame plaque does not record what came next, after the 1986 Celtics let him go.
The Brotherhood website includes Greg Wendt because the Duke Class of 1981 includes Greg Wendt. We are watching for the rest of his post-1986 career - whether the Wall Street prediction came true and the corporate path took him there, whether the path turned toward coaching or teaching or business or any of the other directions a former Division I captain might choose. If you know Greg Wendt of Detroit Catholic Central CC '81, Duke '81-'83, Detroit Mercy '83-'86, please write to us at the Brotherhood. The Hall of Fame plaque tells half the story. The rest belongs to the Brotherhood members who knew him - the freshman walk-on teammates at Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Detroit Mercy revival roster, the Boston Celtics rookie camp, the CC Hall of Fame committee that wrote his induction bio in 2016. Coach K's first major recruit became one of the foundational Brotherhood stories of the early era. The kid from Detroit Catholic Central went home and made the most of his second chance. The Brotherhood records both halves.