When a team has a history as long as the Green Bay Packers, most of the players are bound to end up as footnotes. That’s certainly the case of Ray DiPierro, who was with the team for just 18 games in 1950 and 1951.

But if DiPierro is a footnote, he’s a reminder that even footnotes are there to teach you something.

Looking back more than three quarters of a century, DiPierro is evidence of how the game really works — and how much it has changed.

A high school star in Toledo, DiPierro ended up at Ohio State University for his college ball, where he blocked for Heisman winner Les Horvath, before landing with the Chicago Bears ever so briefly in1949. But when the Green Bay Packers needed a new head coach in 1950, Gene Ronzani, a backfield coach with the Bears, got the job. And he brought DiPierro with him. Sometimes it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. That’s the case even in the NFL today.

DiPierro didn’t make much of a mark in Green Bay. His biggest contribution might have been his nickname, Dippy, which was bestowed on him by Hall of Fame back Tony Canadeo. Canadeo and others had trouble pronouncing his name, so Dippy became the go-to moniker.

“‍Call him Dippy and get it over with,’‍” DiPierro told The Toledo Blade later on. “So I’ve always been Dippy in Green Bay.”

Even with the benefit of historical hindsight, DiPierro still shows how different the game of football used to be. A guard, DiPierro played at a listed height and weight of 5-foot-11 and 210 pounds, barely big enough to be a running back today. For comparison, the Packers didn’t play a guard in 2025 that weighed less than 311 pounds, and that player was Jordan Morgan, who really belongs at tackle. DiPierro would barely be a speed bump for any self-respecting defensive lineman in modern football.

And yet there he was, lining up for 18 games for the Green Bay Packers of the early 1950s. The Packers went just 3-15 in those 18 games, but DiPierro did make something of a mark. He managed to get his hands on the ball for three separate kickoff returns, including one he brought back 26 yards.

Still, it was a small impact. A search of the Green Bay Press-Gazette archives turns up just one mention of DiPierro: a shot of him and a few of his teammates visiting fullback Jack Cloud in the hospital as he recovers from a back injury. The picture was taken early in the 1951 season, and DiPierro is referred to as a “former” member of the Packers, though he’d return to the team later in the season for his last taste of professional football.

But there’s a twist to that photo. The official story was that Cloud was in the hospital because of a back injury, DiPierro said in an interview with Cliff Christl of Packers.com many years later that wasn’t the case.

“"Jack Cloud got a few too many drinks in him one night and slow-rolled his car into the (East) River. He went down the embankment and landed right in the river,” DiPierro said. “But I think the only thing that came out in the paper was that Cloud got hurt in practice. Nobody made a fuss about it. They kept the drinking incident under the covers."

And the drinking didn’t stop there. DiPierro said he and his teammates smuggled about a gallon of martinis into Cloud’s hotel room, got fall down drunk, and had to be hauled out of the hospital on a stretcher, telling Christl the hospital staff told him “You’re the first guy ever to get carried out of a hospital.”

Though his stint in the pros was a short one, he definitely made the most of it, and DiPierro was still a hometown hero. He was inducted into the Libbey High School Football Hall of Fame, the Toledo City Athletic League Halls of Fame, and the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame. He passed away in 2014 in Perrysburg, Ohio, not far from the Toledo stomping grounds where he made his first marks on the sports world. If that’s what it takes to be a footnote, DiPierro did more than enough.