The AFC North has consistently been one of the most intense in the NFL landscape. However, games between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens take that up another notch. Time and time again, these teams have battled for the AFC North’s throne, and this rivalry has become one of, if not the most intense in the entire league.
The two teams faced each other to kick off the 2011 NFL season, but this game wasn’t particularly close. Baltimore got the best of Pittsburgh, winning 35-7. However, the biggest moment from the game didn’t have anything to do with that. During the game, former Steelers’ defender LaMarr Woodley got into a scuffle with Ravens’ tackle Michael Oher on the field. One of the game’s officials, Tony Corrente tried to break up the scrum.
Corrente ended up being inadvertently pushed over, landing hard. Corrente wasn’t doing well in the following days, and ended up going to the hospital, where it was revealed that Corrente actually had cancer. Woodley appeared on the ‘Not Just Football With Cam Heyward‘ podcast, and he spoke about that incident.
“We were playing the Baltimore Ravens in Baltimore,” Woodley said. “The blindside guy [Oher], he grabbed Ryan Mundy and we all got into a big tussle. We got into a tussle on the field, and we knocked over one of the referees. So when we knocked over the referee, he ended up having to go to the hospital ’cause he had a lump on his chest. So when he had a lump on his chest, he found out that he had cancer… We knocked him over, he had chest pain, found out he had cancer, so we saved his life.”
It truly is a remarkable turn of events, but it helps put the game into a different perspective as well. The Steelers-Ravens rivalry means a lot to both sides, but at the end of the day, these are humans playing the games, with Corrente’s unfortunate diagnosis being a reminder of that. Fortunately, Corrente has recovered well.
Still, this is the ultimate ‘butterfly effect’ in action. If LaMarr Woodley didn’t get into that ‘tussle’ as he describes it, which ended up revealing Corrente’s cancer, who knows what could have happened. It’s wild to think how important that small fight turned out to be.
