When you’re drafted into the AFC North, your friends and enemies are decided for you. At least, that’s how it used to be. If you’re drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers, you hate the Baltimore Ravens. And the Ravens hate you. Or that’s how it feels on the field, at least.
Perhaps nobody got a more ungracious welcome to the rivalry than former Steelers RB Rashard Mendenhall, who had his shoulder broken by none other than Hall of Fame ILB Ray Lewis on the first play of the second half. Though he’s told the story before, he went into more detail about the background on the Raw Room podcast—explaining that he knew who was meeting in the hole, only he felt a certain obligation to step up to the plate.
“In my mind, ‘He’s small, he a B, Imma run his ass over’. Just slammed on the gas, went right into Ray, and that was it, and that shit cost me my shoulder”, he recalled. “It was like a Corvette went into a tree, wrapped my damn Corvette around a tree. I ran into him with my shoulder, shoulder was gone”.
That certainly didn’t feel too good. it was his first career start in the fourth game of the season. He’d had a few good runs in the first quarter, but finished that game with just 30 rushing yards on nine carries—including the three that earned him a stabilizing sling and a stint on the Reserve/Injured List for the rest of his rookie season.
But there was a little background to all that. Evidently, at least on his side of the story, he jokingly told friend Ray Rice, also a rookie that year drafted by the Ravens, that he was going to run over Baltimore. The defense used that as fuel—and they targeted him, as Lewis let him know at the end of the first quarter.
“He’s like, ’34, you know we gunning for you right?’. And I was like, ‘What? Say that again?’”, Lewis repeating what he said. “I was like, ‘Please, Ray, ain’t nobody worried about you, man’. He was like, ‘Alright, well you better be, because I’m gonna be the motherfucker to knock you out’”.
And then he did, of course, albeit 15 minutes later. And it wasn’t so much the hit itself as where he was hit. Mendenhall noted the slight turn as he worked through a tackle that resulted in all of the force of the hit being isolated at one spot. “It had to come out at one point”. But it resulted in a clean break that kept him from needing surgery, but left him with a long recovery period.
Not that he knew that immediately. He recalled initially getting up and trying to play it off before quickly realizing that was not an option. “I go to the huddle and I’m like, ‘Yo, something not right’. It felt like the top left part of my body was missing. I knew something was wrong”, he said. “I couldn’t even pick my arm up”.
Mendenhall was supposed to be the complement as a rookie to former Pro Bowler Willie Parker. It didn’t quite work out that way, but they ended up winning the Super Bowl that year all the same.
He went on to have a decent career with a couple of standout seasons, scoring 13 touchdowns in 2010, for example, but unfortunately for him, most Steelers fans don’t remember him for that. It’s either the broken shoulder, the fumble in the Super Bowl, or some cultural commentary here and there. But I do think we should remember that for a period of time, he was a quality back, who probably would have been best suited to the offensive line Le’Veon Bell would have a short time after him. He played with arguably the worst offensive line the team ever had.
