Balzer is in Arizona.... covering the Arizona Cardinals for Sports Illustrated

He left St Louis in September. There was an article in the Post-Dispatch.


Balzer goes to Arizona

More than three decades ago, the football Cardinals moved from St. Louis to Phoenix to try to cash in on a better financial situation there. Howard Balzer was on the air then, early in his longtime St. Louis sports-talk career, bantering about the team. Now Balzer finally is catching up with the Big Red 32 years later, having just made the move from St. Louis to Arizona to cover them for Sports Illustrated’s website (www.si.com/nfl/cardinals/).

“What goes around comes around,” he said, chuckling.

Balzer has built his career around reporting on pro football, and early this year thought he might have a chance to do that locally with the XFL and the BattleHawks. But that operation shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, and though it has been bought out of bankruptcy no timetable for a return has been announced.

So Balzer began covering the Cardinals for SI from afar in early March — about the time the pandemic began hitting hard. He said it was not a hindrance then to be so distant from the team on which he was reporting.

“It didn’t affect what I was doing at all because I had the same access as anyone who was there — everything was done via Zoom” conferences, he said.

When it became evident that the NFL was forging ahead with its season this fall, it was imperative that Balzer relocate. So he arrived late last week in the Phoenix area for the next saga of his life. At 69, it was not easy to depart from St. Louis, where he had been living for all but about 18 months since 1978.

“It was very emotional to leave,” Balzer said. “I spent almost all of my adult life there. My career was made there, first at the Sporting News (which led to) covering the NFL draft for ESPN to being on radio, and writing.”

He was in St. Louis for 40 years, with the only interruption being a year and half in the mid 1990s when he did a national radio show from Las Vegas. But Balzer returned in 1995, coinciding with the arrival of the Rams.

[www.stltoday.com]

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