Why would you think it would just bend the rods?
If the piston is going up and the valve is opening, they will meet, this will cause the lesser component to re arrange it's direction of travel, which will be the valve. The valve is attached to the rocker which has the rods on the opposite side which are governed by the cam.
So the valve will change direction, causing stress on the rocker arm, which in turn causes stress on the push rod and cam bearings. If the valve arm bends, it'll upset the rocker manouvering up/down which will upset and/or bend the push rod and make the cam roller bearings get upset, and then in turn the cam.
This is all happening at an exceptional speed and happening at an astonishing rate, for every revolution you are quite happily mashing up the internal working parts of your engine from stressing the piston pinion to the cam itself, each item in your engine is precision based for it's use, put one small part out of sync and you'll have a whole heap of problems and parts which may look fine, but would have undergone more stress than they were designed too.