When Nathan Tinkler first turned up on Novocastrians’ radar he was a 34-year-old billionaire, a local bloke who’d got lucky in coal and ploughed a heap of cash into a stud farm for thoroughbred horses. And for locals, knights did not come whiter.

He loaned the Newcastle Knights $500,000, interest free. He took over the battling Newcastle Jets. Almost immediately he secured the Jets a game with LA Galaxy, which meant David Beckham (David Beckham!) came to Newcastle (to Newcastle!) He secured three netball Tests for the town. He took over Surfest which was about to go belly up. He even talked about revitalising Hunter Street Mall. And locals asked, What about this Tinkler bloke? How good is he?

For here he was, a “normal” bloke, a local bloke, apprenticed in the mines, a bloke who’d made a billion dollars in a couple of years. And he wanted to put his money back into Newcastle, into the Hunter. And locals thought, How good’s this bloke? He saved the Jets, he saved the festival of the surf, he brought Beckham to town. And now he wanted to buy the beloved rugby league club, Newcastle Knights. And Newcastle, the people, backed him like Bob Hawke. The Johns brothers backed him. Paul Harragon backed him. And the Members voted to hand him the club with a 97 per cent majority.

And the Newcastle Herald? Backed him like everyone else. Newspaper staff thought he was great. Journos didn’t have much to do with Tinkler himself. He was a sort of an “other” figure; enigmatic, even larger-than-life. But his staff, slick operators Richard Fisk, Ken Edwards, Troy Palmer, they were impressive, talked a great game. And once the Knights’ board endorsed the takeover, the Herald ran with it 100 per cent.

And things went along nicely for a while. HSG were happy to leak information to journalists and use the Herald to get their message across. It was mutual, win-win. Until it all started to change.

Tinkler was voted in by Knights members on March 31st, 2011. There was then an interim period before he and his staff would run the club. Once everything was ship-shape, they’d sign the documents and take over.

Yet one of the stipulations of being ship-shape was HSG coming up with a $20 million bank guarantee by a certain date after the vote. Come the date, no guarantee. There was an extended deadline. Still no guarantee. And then another one. And the Herald were the first to report it. What’s going on? Where’s this $20 million? Isn’t old mate worth one billion?

Eventually HSG came good. Yet Tinkler took a dim view of the newspaper’s reportage. It would get quite a bit darker.

A year or so later Tinkler tried to hand the Jets back to Football Federation Australia (FFA). There’d been ongoing arguments about various issues. He reckoned he’d paid over the odds for the Jets’ license. He declared he’d had a gut-full, was walking away. Everything I’ve done for these people. And he may have believed the people of Newcastle - those whose teams and surfing festival he had saved, to whom he had delivered Beckham - would back him on it: Goodonya Nathan! Don’t put up with shit from these FFA clowns…

Instead Newcastle largely took another view of Tinkler’s brinkmanship: that it was bullshit. Locals felt that Tinkler had used the Jets and the goodwill gained from “saving” them to buy into the Knights. And now he was going to dud the city by walking away from the Jets. The Herald got into him about it, wrote it, feisty columns that asked, Where’s the money? And didn’t that rub Tinkler the wrong way. Who are these fleas to dare question me…

Yet what really set Tinkler against the Herald were yarns by investigative journalist Donna Page. In an award-winning series, Page wrote of small business people - contractors, tradesmen - Hunter Valley “locals” who were owed money by Tinkler. There was a front page story titled “Trail of Debt” detailing businesses to whom Tinkler owed money. And locals copped to the fact that a bloke who’d been trading on being a billionaire was actually not paying people. Celebrity local hero Matthew Johns said on radio: “The Newcastle Knights have always had a great tie with the community of Newcastle and the people of the Hunter. ‘Our team, our town’ is what they used to say. That has been damaged because Nathan Tinkler’s policy up in Newcastle for too long has been pay the little bloke last. If you want to earn disdain in a town like Newcastle then you pay the little bloke last.”

Further stories followed. The Tax office were chasing Tinkler for $3 million-plus. Finance journalist Paddy Manning produced his seminal work Boganaire: The Rise and Fall of Nathan Tinkler and previously finance-illiterate sports writers found angles. Players weren’t paid on time. Star fullback Darius Boyd refused to speak to sponsors or attend functions. There was discontent at HSG, allegations of bullying, high staff turnover.

And for all this “negativity”, Tinkler blamed The Newcastle Herald. And thus HSG refused to recognise the Herald or answer its questions. If the Herald wrote stories, HSG would reply with a statement on their website querying the veracity of the report, effectively saying “Don’t believe the Herald”. They would email these missives to 15,000 Knights members, soothing the Members: Don’t believe it; everything’s under control…

Yet the Herald kept digging. For four years, writing comment yarns, analysis, news, that further undermined HSG’s ever-shrinking credibility. And the rest of the media rolled with it. Something’s crook in Tallarook.

Meanwhile, the Knights were under-achieving. HSG had signed “Supercoach” and sacred cow Wayne Bennett, and in Bennett’s first season the Knights finished 12th. Bennett signed several players in their thirties - Jeremy Smith, Danny Buderus, Craig Gower, Timana Tahu, Willie Mason. Kade Snowden was suspended for breaking Cowboy Ray Thompson’s jaw, Smith was suspended for a head slam. HSG, via the Knights’ website, claimed their players were hard done by. The Herald called bullshit. Robert Dillon - who would win a Walkley Award for his dogged, courageous coverage - wrote commentary querying if they had been hard done by given “loading” and other “rules”. He questioned Bennett’s signing of “old” players. He wrote against HSG’s gospel. And the Knights black-banned the newspaper.

Chief Executive Officer and Knights legend Matt Gidley delivered the news. Herald staff wondered had it come from Gidley, Tinkler or Bennett? Or the players? Or all of them? Bennett had form, he’d black-banned Courier-Mail journos in Brisbane. And Tinkler, well... They knew HSG hated the paper.

The Herald thought about black-banning the club back, put it on the front page. Thought better of it. If you go down that route and they don’t back off, where do you go? HSG rescinded the ban to mean Dillon only. He still went to games and press conferences and worked around it. Kept at them. Won a Walkley for it. And Newcastle turned against Nathan Tinkler.

Senior Knights staff held meetings behind Tinkler’s back, planning for the day when HSG was gone. They called it returning to “The Newcastle Way”. Community engagement. Local sponsors. Treating “Old boys” with respect. And keep the toys in the pram.

Dillon and fellow Herald journo, Brett Keeble, had covered every Knights game since the first one in 1988. They’d effectively written every story in the club’s history. They’d covered everything from human interest stuff - the local junior who’d grown up in Kurri Kurri, worked as a butcher - to Super League to premierships. Yet HSG decided these guys couldn’t talk to players, or staff. And the message was implicit: Stop writing negative stuff about Nathan and we’ll consider letting you talk to the players.

But the Herald didn’t cave. They garnered quotes from the Knights’ website. Spoke to the NRL, player agents. It made them more resourceful. They couldn’t just go to the club and ask for comment. The club wouldn’t give them anything. So they’d get all their ducks lined up and then go to the club for comment. And then, once HSG knew the Herald were onto something and going to write it, the yarn would miraculously appear in rival media.

If Herald journalists emailed the club to seek comment, HSG wouldn’t reply. Rather they would reply with statements on their website, without attribution, replying to the Herald’s issues with positive spin.

Then the Herald got a call. A voice on the phone suggested Tinkler was struggling to cover the bank guarantee, again. It was reviewed every year. With the money in doubt it opened up the possibility of the NRL kicking Tinkler out. The man had a habit of pulling rabbits out his hat, and he might do it again.

But he didn’t. Not this time. Couldn’t guarantee the cash. And the NRL - after some jiggy-pokery that ensured there would be no legal action by HSG - kicked Tinkler and HSG out.

And here we are, with the FFA waiting on money like the NRL was. With the threat of legal action. Brinkmanship. Leverage. Fear and loathing.

It’s estimated the Jets would cost a million a year to run. Yet many of the club’s sponsors have been Tinkler’s own companies.

What’s doing? Hard to say. Cynics would say this latest malarkey could be a tactic to make FFA buy Tinkler out of his $5 million license. The NRL’s $10 million bank guarantee was the leverage they had to get him out. But he was threatening legal action, to injunct. In the end the NRL came up with half of the bank guarantee and said, Look, we’ll sort these debts. And they lured him out with a deal and without legal action.

But the FFA don’t have that. They’ve got grounds to force Tinkler out if he doesn’t pay these debts, as they did with former owner Con Constantine. But Tinkler could injunct, take legal action, and make the FFA think, We don’t want to go to court, let it drag on…

Yet the way Tinkler’s gone about sacking players and coaches, and talking about the future, maybe he is in it for the long haul. He might be serious about trying to hang onto it. Who would know? HSG didn’t reply to the Guardian’s request for an interview.

Six months ago Tinkler wanted to get rid of the club. Three years ago he tried to give it back. Since then he’s been a begrudging owner. It’s like he hung on because Frank Lowy wanted to sue him. Now the irony is that it appears FFA would love to get rid of him. It’s understood they’re working behind the scenes with Dundee United, that Dundee is interested.

But why would a Scottish Premier League club pay $5 million for a club that’s never made a profit in ten years in any single season not even when they won the grand final? And how hard will it be for Tinkler to offload the club at the price he wants? Pressure’s on.

Pressure is on FFA too. They’ve talked tough: Don’t meet this deadline, look out. What if now they give him an extension, or don’t follow through and turf him out?

Tinkler is renowned for paying things at the death. And it wouldn’t surprise that his attitude is that he’s been given a deadline, if he deigns to pay it will be on deadline and not an hour earlier.

So, some questions: Does Tinkler have any money? Why does he take so long to pay his bills? And when he does, eventually, how does he do it? What chance the FFA getting money owed? What chance the employees of Patinack Farm? What chance Gerry Harvey? Turn to page one of today’s Newcastle Herald, read Donna Page’s report about Tinkler owing Harvey $22 million. It’s all a mystery, even to finance experts, according to author Paddy Manning.

“Tinkler has not been able to offload his property assets and has unpaid debts everywhere,” says Manning. “And there’s a corruption inquiry hanging over his head. But still, amazingly, he seems to have access to enough money to not only keep himself afloat but prop up an ailing football club and threaten the FFA with legal action.”

We know this: at one point in his life Nathan Tinkler was worth $1.3 billion, at least on paper. You’d have to think that at some point he had hundreds of millions in cash. And then he blew it, or most of it, on horses, footy clubs, David Beckham. And if the Jets’ license is the only thing he still owns, you can expect a rather protracted fight for it.