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.