Larry Linney 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. Larry Linney was 6'6" by his senior year of high school. He had played basketball at the kind of level that placed him on the Duke recruiting radar in the spring of 1977 - the year Bill Foster's Duke program was building toward what would become the most famous postseason run in Foster's coaching career.
Larry Linney's college basketball trajectory at Duke would, by his own four-year arc, parallel Jim Suddath's almost exactly. Suddath, a year older and on full scholarship out of Woodward Academy in Atlanta, was on the freshman class that came in fall 1977. Linney, also entering Duke in the fall of 1977, came in as a walk-on - a player whose Duke roster spot depended on what he could prove in practice each season rather than on a scholarship guarantee. The Foster recruiting class of 1977 had also brought in Gene Banks and Kenny Dennard as the high-profile names; Mike Gminski was already there as the rising junior All-American. Linney was the talented walk-on who made the practice rotation work. He was on the Duke roster for Foster's 1977-78 season - the campaign that would, by April 1978, place his freshman class on the Duke team that reached the NCAA national championship game.
The 1977-78 Duke team won the ACC Tournament, advanced through the NCAA Tournament regional bracket, beat Notre Dame in the national semifinal, and lost to Kentucky 94-88 in the title game played at The Checkerdome in St. Louis. The same Kentucky game that, four decades later, Jon Weingart would tell his JHU Hub interviewer was the reason he had heard of Duke when his study-hall classmate flipped him a Duke application. Larry Linney's freshman year was Duke basketball's pre-K modern-era apogee. He was a deep-bench walk-on freshman on the most famous Duke team Bill Foster ever coached. He stayed on the roster. He earned his way back each summer. The walk-on trajectory that defines Larry Linney's Duke story began with a runner-up freshman year and would, four years later, run through Coach K's first Duke season.