Jim Oberhofer and his daughter Ashley will dance in competition on August 9 for two great reasons.

They will honor the memory of Tammy Oberhofer, who passed away June 18, 2013, and help raise money for the American Cancer Society. Mrs. Oberhofer passed away after a long and bravely fought battle with cancer.

The Oberhofers will participate in Floorplay, A Fun Dance Competition for Charity, at Concourse Hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan.   

“We are dancing in my wife Tammy’s name and I think it’s great,” said Jim Oberhofer, more commonly known in the racing community as Jim O.

Jim Oberhofer and his daughter Ashley will dance in competition on August 9 for two great reasons.

They will honor the memory of Tammy Oberhofer, who passed away June 18, 2013, and help raise money for the American Cancer Society. Mrs. Oberhofer passed away after a long and bravely fought battle with cancer.

The Oberhofers will participate in Floorplay, A Fun Dance Competition for Charity, at Concourse Hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan.   

“We are dancing in my wife Tammy’s name and I think it’s great,” said Jim Oberhofer, more commonly known in the racing community as Jim O.

“It’s just a fun event for people to come out and have fun,” he continued. “The competitions, it’s not like the normal dance competitions that I go to, it’s more fun.”

Jim O first got into dancing in late 2009 when he bought Tammy and himself a three-lesson package of dance lessons. At the time he never intended to do more than get the lessons done and over with. He began to enjoy dancing so much, however, that by the third lesson he purchased 20 more.

Before Jim O knew it, he was knee-deep into dance competition, and Tammy supported her husband’s pursuit of dance excellence.

“I have a hard time doing anything for fun, especially when you can be competitive in it,” said Jim O. “[Tammy’s] idea of fun and my idea of fun were two different things. We enjoyed it, like we enjoyed watching Dancing With the Stars. I enjoy competing, Tammy went and did a competition once with her instructor and she did well. She would do well when she did stuff like that. It took a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of effort to do something like that.

“I didn’t have a lot of time to do that and neither did she. Something’s always going to take away from something else. When I was trying to compete that would take away from time I would spend with her and Ashley. She liked it and she liked watching me dance and watching me compete when she could. She just enjoyed it and I think if my competitive genes, if they wouldn’t get involved so much, then we would have had a lot more fun.”

Jim O hasn’t danced much this year but that doesn’t mean he’s lost any of his skills.

“I haven’t been dancing a whole lot this year because of everything with Tammy that was going on,” Oberhofer said. “I’ve really cut back quite a bit. The people at Footnotes, my instructors, we’ve remained friends and we’ve remained close and obviously they were trying to do something for Tammy. We were hoping she would still be around when this was going to go on but it didn’t work out.”

Jim O said he may return to dancing competition in the future. But for now, he’s concentrating on the upcoming competition with Ashley where he says there will be such categories as a three-person salsa and maybe even a hint of disco.  

When asked if he sees dancing as a part of his healing process after losing his wife, Jim O couldn’t really say for sure.

“I don’t know, that’s hard to say,” Jim O said. “I look at it as a hobby and it’s something I can have fun doing. I have to remember that I need to have fun because when I was competing I would aggravate myself if I didn’t do good. I’m like ‘oh crap I already do that enough on the race track I don’t need to be doing that out on the dance floor’. So I need to rethink how I go about that and make sure that when I do dance that I make sure I have fun at it. So I don’t get eaten up with being so competitive.

“It’s bad enough when you spend so much time trying to win races and then on your time when you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself you aggravate yourself by trying to go out and win competitions it’s like ‘all right you’re stressing yourself out too much.’ I think it’s something for me that if I go about it the right way it could be fun. I never was much of a golfer and I looked at it as my golf.

“I’m having fun with it and I’ve just got to remember that if I do do it that I’ve got to have fun at it and I don’t stress myself out over it because any time the opportunity to go out and win a top male student award or a top student award that’s like saying you could go to the race track and win a Wally or win a championship at the end of the year. Those competitive juices start flowing and the next thing you know you’re sucked in.”

This time, winning or losing isn’t the most important aspect of competing, honoring Tammy and having fun with Ashley is.

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