When Wimbledon was on, the O’Connors pulled their iron gate across the driveway in Forest View and it became the net. The driveway sloped, so every second game you changed ends and played uphill. Behind Cian Smith’s house were the old boys’ school pitches, three of them laid out lengthways back then, and the lads hopped the fence to get at them.

In winter the game moved onto the road. Two bits of wood at each end, the footpaths for sidelines, and somebody shouting “Car” when headlights came round the corner. Everyone kicked the wood out of the way, the car went past, and the game picked up again. With the street lights, it went on until all hours.

Cian was the youngest of that gang, playing with lads four and five years older who kicked him around the place and got kicked back.

“You couldn’t have grown up anywhere better.”

A pound each and a cup from Main Street

Around the age of nine or ten there were street leagues: Forest View, Churchview, Termon and Plunkett Avenue, with the usual arguments about who could play for whom. At one tournament in the boys’ school everyone handed over a pound, and when it was over the money went into Gay Sheeran’s old sports shop on Main Street and came back out as a cup.

From there it was Boyle GAA and Boyle Celtic, the same lads in both. Cian names Sean Young and Johnny Greenan as the men who ran nearly every team he was on from under twelve to minor, and says he only understood what they gave once he was on the other side of it himself. He played both codes until he got sick, and some people in Boyle still tell him he was the better soccer player.

At six he was a mascot at the 1994 intermediate county final, with his best friend Kyle McLaughlin. Afterwards the pair of them were out through the sunroof of Desi McLaughlin’s red BMW while the town beeped its horns. He can still see that day.

June 24, June 24, June 24

After sixth class Cian went boarding at St Jarlath’s College in Tuam, training three evenings a week and coming home every weekend for Boyle Celtic on Saturday and the GAA on Sunday.

In 2006 he made Fergal O’Donnell’s Roscommon minor panel. Nobody expected much. They lost league games and challenge matches, the worst on a wet March day in Armagh. On the bus home Cian joked to Paul Garvey from Kilmore about what it would be like if they won the All-Ireland. Everyone laughed.

O’Donnell kept repeating one date: June 24, the first round against Galway. Roscommon won by four. Then came a Connacht final against Mayo in Castlebar, played before the senior final, with thousands pouring in early. Then Tipperary in Tullamore, and Meath in Croke Park, travelling in behind a Garda escort. Coming through Fairview, Cian spotted two Boyle lads outside a house in Roscommon jerseys, a drink in each hand, waving at the bus.

A replay, and a job that would not wait

The final against Kerry was a draw. There is a photo of Cian at the final whistle shaking a Kerry player’s hand and looking distraught. After a nine month contract in Ulster Bank he had landed a job with Permanent TSB, and told them he would start the Monday week after the final so he could celebrate first. The replay was set for the Saturday before.

It was in Ennis. Cian reckons 90 percent of the crowd were from Roscommon, with five or six thousand in the ground an hour and a half before the throw-in. Roscommon won.

On the Sunday he made himself get the train to Dublin so he would not be tempted to stay. He fell asleep around Carrick and woke up in Connolly Station surrounded by Americans, the Ryder Cup having finished at the K Club that weekend. He turned off his phone at seven that evening and slept until seven the next morning.

The man who wanted to hold the cup

That autumn the cup went to every school in Roscommon. In Boyle, Cian, Kieran Cox and the other local players brought it to Abbey Community College, the convent and St Joseph’s, his own old school. Some of the infants in those photos are now players he manages.

Because he was working rather than in college, he got the calls when someone was sick. He went into the Plunkett Home at 18 not knowing what to expect, and found people nearly lifting themselves out of the bed. One man there was not into football at all.

“I just want to hold an All Ireland cup.”

A hoarse voice in the kitchen

By 2007 Cian was 19, living in Maynooth, working in the bank and going out with Michelle, now his wife. He had been hoarse for about a year.

One Friday after training, for a reason he still cannot explain, he went in the back door instead of the front. His father was at the kitchen table having tea with Nash Patel, an ENT consultant at Sligo hospital and a family friend. Patel heard the voice and asked to have a look. Cian said he was not going. An appointment arrived anyway.

A scope in Sligo led to a specialist in Dublin, then to two biopsies at St Vincent’s Hospital. His only worry was whether he would be fit for an under 21 match. After the second, Professor Angus Curran and his team drew the curtains around the bed. It was cancer, in his throat and vocal cord. His parents had known since he was in theatre and had already told Michelle, his brothers and his friends, with instructions not to contact him until eight o’clock. He was the last to know.

“Just get it out of me.”

Seven and a half hours, and a page of questions

The tumour was stage three, on his left vocal cord. Cian chose surgery. On 31 October 2007 he had a hemilaryngectomy, removing half of his larynx. His father was told it would take seven and a half hours and nothing was guaranteed. Cian was not told that part. Before it, his friends took him out to Eddie Rockets in Donnybrook, and back home a Mass was said for him in Boyle.

He woke in intensive care with a cut from behind his ear to the middle of his neck, held with staples. Michelle still talks about those staples. He could not speak, so he wrote. When a family friend, Tony, came in, too nervous for hospitals, he took the pen and started writing his own questions down too. Later Cian wrote a message for his father to pass on: he was not deaf.

The tumour had been 2mm from his right vocal cord, so radiotherapy followed. He had been told to forget about Christmas at home, and walked out of hospital on 25 November.

A mask, ten minutes a day, and no Christmas dinner

Radiotherapy was ten minutes a day, with a mesh mask moulded to his face and clipped to the bed. For the first month he felt fine, and went to the cinema in the middle of the day. He had to learn to swallow again, starting with water, marshmallow and mashed banana under a live X-ray.

At Christmas, with the whole extended family at the house, his throat went just before the turkey. The pain stayed until radiotherapy ended on 1 February 2008. Some days he slept from lunchtime to eleven the next morning, and he went down to about nine and a half stone.

There were dark days, and he says he cried to himself in hospital, asking why it was him at 19. They were few. The cards from GAA and soccer clubs all over the county, including Carrick Town and Arrow Harps, are still in a box in his parents’ attic. During treatment he met Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners every day, there for the same thing, and remembers the contrast between a man in his seventies and a 19 year old.

Rome wasn’t built in a day

By spring 2008 he was back at Boyle training, against everyone’s advice. After a couple of runs he could barely talk, and Liam Conroy put a hand on him and told him Rome wasn’t built in a day. That October Cian came on in the county intermediate final and scored a goal. On 31 October 2008, a year to the day after his surgery, he was in Sligo having his appendix out.

In 2013 Boyle won the intermediate championship, which he puts level with the minor medal. But the radiotherapy had left scar tissue, and his windpipe is about half the normal size. Sean Purcell, marking him at training, asked if he should be playing at all. In 2014 he spent a year in goal, then stopped.

The trach

In November 2014 Cian had a tracheostomy, a tube in his neck that he breathes through. He changes the inner tube every day, wears a waterproof bib to shower, and cannot swim. The first thing he checks in a hotel room is whether the shower head comes off the wall. Michelle is now the expert at changing the ties that hold the tube, and Killian, four, stands beside her waiting for his turn.

Cian says the tracheostomy was harder than the cancer, because he had never seen anyone else with one, not on Grafton Street and not among 80,000 people in Croke Park. He caught himself hunching to hide it, and still wears collars and quarter zips. He got the all clear from the cancer after five years. Professor Curran has since died, and Cian’s new consultant has looked at removing the tube, but Cian will not risk his voice.

“If I have it for the rest of my life, I have the rest of my life.”

When I’m in, I’m in

He was a Boyle selector in 2015 and 2016, and cringes now at how sure he was. He coached the DIT Sigerson Cup team and spent two years of Saturdays at IT Tallaght earning his auctioneering licence. In 2018 he and Michelle moved home, the same week Killian was born. In 2019 he left Permanent TSB on a Friday and was at an auction on the Saturday.

He grew up around the trade, sitting in the passenger seat taking down phone numbers from a car phone, and says he learned more in six months in the office than in two years of college. He managed Coolera/Strandhill to a Sligo senior final, then told Kilmore he would give them one year only, in case the Boyle job came up. It did.

“When I’m in, I’m in.”

Not a million miles away

In 2022 Boyle won the league for the first time in the club’s history, beat Michael Glaveys in a quarter-final, and met St Brigid’s in the semi-final a week later, having lost four semi-finals in seven years. Cian told the players to take the handbrake off. When he saw older club members crying on the pitch afterwards, it hit him: Boyle had not been in a county senior final for 96 years.

The town went up in bunting. A Club Rossie bus went round the schools, and every child under 16 got a free ticket. Boyle lost the final to Strokestown with the last kick of the game. Cian did not want to go to the homecoming on the Crescent. He went, and the size of the crowd made him determined to get back.

He finishes on the town: the musical society, the athletics club, the cyclists, the First Thursday folk club, and people with skills nobody knows about. In his work he sees people his age and older wanting to come home.

“I loved going away from home, learn the ropes, but I loved even more coming back.”

Listen to the full episode

The conversation runs to just under two hours. When Cian told one of his brothers he was coming on Voices of Boyle, the brother roared laughing at the irony. Some voice, he said. Listen and decide for yourself.

Stepping Up: Cian In Action Managing the Boyle Senior Team Pic Credit: Roscommon People

Donie&Enda Smith in Action in the Blue&Yellow. Pic: James Crombie

The Smith Family were presented with The Dermot Earley Family Award in March 2019.