Chris Carrino: pushing the envelope in his craft and his foundation

Listen to Game 3 highlights from Chris Carrino as he paints word pictures of the action, delivering it all in real time, never faltering as things change, his voice matching the game pace.  It's been that way now for more than a decade spanning one Jason Kidd era to another.

At his perch high above Barclays, Carrino sits on a cushion he calls "Jackson" after one Phil Jackson uses to compensate for a bad back. Carrino needs his to compensate for the disease he was diagnosed with as he was leaving his beloved Fordham, a form of muscular dystrophy called facioscapulohumeral, or FSHD.

As Neil Best of Newsday writes, Carrino plays with pain but also uses it to push his foundation for medical research into the rare disease ... uses the pain and his position as a public figure. He started the foundation three years ago and is now not just the voice of the Nets but of FSHD research.

"It was really difficult, because I never would really even talk about it to anybody unless people needed to know," he told Best. "Now I stand in front of a room of 450 people at our event and pour my heart out about what it means to live with the disease.

"It's been cathartic for me to be out in the open with it and not worry about how people perceive me."

He also says he couldn't do his job without the help of the Nets --and his broadcast partner Tim Capstraw.

"A guy like Tim or the equipment managers, or really everybody in the organization, looks out for me on the road and is there to grab my bag or help me up steps or let me hold onto them if I have to walk across the tarmac if there is ice," he said.

• Chris Carrino, voice of the Nets, speaks out on disease that afflicts him - Neil Best - Newsday