PHOTO: DAVID WHITE / STUFF The Avondale Jockey Club is trapped between the past and the future.
“Bro, I’m telling you, man,” insists Theodore, several times, while walking across Avondale Racecourse on a non-race day in the rain. There’s a beer in his hand and the 64-year-old former truck driver claims his heart is breaking.
“Our community revolved around this racecourse,” he says. “In the past, if you didn’t get married, didn’t have your 21st, in those rooms up there you were nobody … this racecourse is our life and they’re destroying an icon.”
Theodore’s been trespassed from the icon, he admits, for staging a one-man rally to save it. During a bingo tournament in one of its less dishevelled clubrooms; security escorted him out. But Theodore doesn’t let that stop his daily stroll through the rundown grounds, tipsily reminiscing about its glory days.
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