Observer sports editor

Three days of “kicking back” on the New Jersey shoreline?

Joey Hagerty of Rio Rancho figures he deserves it. After all, he became the city’s first Olympian Sunday when the 2008 U.S. gymnastics team was announced.

“It’s starting to sink in a little bit,” Hagerty, a gymnast since 1989 and a 2000 graduate of La Cueva High School, said in a telephone interview Tuesday morning. “It’s been a crazy, crazy few days. It’s been overwhelming.”

It followed nationally televised (NBC) gymnastics trials competition at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia, where he finished fourth in all-around with a score of 89.25, first in floor (15.39) and high bar (15.25) — his best event, eighth in parallel bars (15.05), sixth in vault (15.85), eighth in pommel horse (13.5), where he slipped and re-aggravated a right-shoulder injury on Saturday, and 11th in rings (14.1), according to the USA Gymnastics Web site.

This won’t be Hagerty’s first trip abroad, only the most prestigious. The 26-year-old competed in international competitions in Brazil in 2005, in France, Brazil and the Ukraine last year, and in Canada earlier this year.

Rounding out the U.S. team are twins Morgan and Paul Hamm of Waukesha, Wis.; Jonathan Horton of Houston, Justin Spring of Burke, Va.; and Kevin Tan of Fremont, Calif.

“Every part of it is memorable,” Hagerty said of the Philadelphia event. “It was so unique, competing with the best guys in the country on Thursday and Saturday — and the media.”

Hagerty said the pommel horse slip and ensuing shoulder injury meant he didn’t have “fun on the rings” and that he had to rely on his adrenaline.

After competing against a dozen fellow gymnasts, Hagerty said it’d be different accompanying them to China as teammates now.

“I’ve been on international trips with them,” he said. “I love competing with them. Every time we’re on the floor together, we want to see each other do well, but it is a business on the floor. You want to make a spot but you want to see your friends (do well).”

The son of Mike and Kathy Hagerty of Rio Rancho, Hagerty said he had been attending the University of New Mexico in pursuit of a degree but gymnastics and his pursuit of a berth on the Olympics team took precedence.

“I was going to go back to school but my schedule has gotten hectic,” he said.

Trained at Gold Cup Gymnastics in northeast Albuquerque, where 1992 Olympic gold-medal gymnast Trent Dimas had trained, Hagerty said he’d received a congratulatory telephone call from Dimas on Monday.

After a few days at the shore, Hagerty said he’d be on his way to a team training camp July 13.

“There’s a lot of work to be done. We have to figure out our game plan,” he explained. “We leave the 28th (of July) for Beijing.”

He said he doesn’t expect to have much time to have fun.

“There’s plenty of time for that after the Olympics. This is the priority,” he said, looking forward later this summer to a visit to Gold Cup to sign the “Olympic wall.”

“When he started maturing into a good athlete, which was about the age of 13 or 14, he made up his mind he wanted to be an Olympian and by God he stuck with it — and he’s going to Beijing,” Ed Burch, Gold Cup owner, told KOB-TV on Sunday.

The Olympics gymnastics competition begins Aug. 8 and will be aired on NBC.

“China’s favored. They won ‘Worlds’ in 2007 and it’s in China,” Hagerty said of the team competition. “Japan is good. Germany has an awesome team.”

He said his parents, in Philadelphia to see the team trials, just missed hearing first-hand that he had made the U.S. team.

“They were going to tell us the team at 1:30 and went into a meeting. Their flight was at 3. They told us there was another meeting at 3:30,” he recalled, so he was unable to tell them verbally but sent them a text message: “Beijing, here I come, baby.”

Three older sisters — Shelley Greene, Dawn Arana and Alena Ziska — also live in Rio Rancho. Ziska works at Gold Cup, he said.

“We are definitely proud of him,” Mike Hagerty said. “It was kind of bone-chilling the way they select the team members. We had our fingers crossed the whole time.”

As for the confirming text message, he said it read, “We’re going to Beijing.

“My one daughter was in the airport and squealed out loud.”

“I am ecstatic — I am so proud of him,” Ziska, a squealer and one-time Level 10 gymnast, said. “He did such a great job. “

The Hagerty family moved to Rio Rancho from Ohio about 30 years ago, he said, and Joey was born and raised in the City of Vision.

“Joey was kind of like born in the gym almost. He ended up in the gym by default — I guess it was when he was about 4 years old — and he’s been there ever since,” he recalled.

Mike Hagerty said neither he nor his wife are sports minded, but “The kids needed, at the time, something to do. I don’t have a story why gymnastics ended up their sport, except Shelley didn’t like ballet.”

The Hagertys’ lives are changing, he said, from the family business, Grand River Supply, in Bernalillo.

“Media attention is something that’s new to us. Joey’s been a gymnast all his life so we might have seen it coming n making the Olympics is beyond anything we ever imagined.”