About 15 years ago the bank almost kicked Tony Santic, his wife and five kids out of their Port Lincoln home.
The bottom had fallen out of the once lucrative tuna fishing business in the South Australian town.
Tough quotas, introduced to help the fish flourish, sent most of the locals broke. Santic, as his family had done for half a century, braced himself to ride out the storm. He'd done it tough before.
Five years before the bank came knocking Santic spent most of his long, lonely days at sea fishing for orange roughy in a leaky tug boat named Vigorous off the wild Tasmanian coast. It was a woolly, dangerous existence.
Thirty years before Port Lincoln almost went down the gurgler, Santic's father had earned a hard living in Geelong, cutting railway sleepers and working as a grease-monkey for Ford after hauling his family halfway across the world from the tiny Croatian island of Lastovo in 1958.
Santic's parents, who knew a bit about fishing, later found themselves at Port Lincoln, where they spent 35 years chugging their fishing boat out into Spencer Gulf.
The migrant Santics knew a great deal about fish and hard yakka. The glamorous world of horse racing, which they knew absolutely nothing about, was for land dwellers.
Like his parents, Tony Santic was not into horse racing. When the bank was circling, Santic was more concerned about kick-starting his flagging business. Tuna farming, mass breeding of the fish in contained ocean ponds, was kicking off. In 1991, Santic got involved.
By 1996 his business had sky-rocketed. He owned tuna farms in Mexico, the Mediterranean and Port Lincoln. Santic's had become the third biggest tuna business in Port Lincoln, which means it was the third biggest in the country. The bank was well and truly off his back. Santic was loaded. He sought an interest, an indulgence.
At Flemington earlier this week, that well-earned indulgence propelled 51-year-old Santic into racing folklore. Makybe Diva is one of at least 100 horses Santic has raced with David Hall in the past five years. He's had many others with trainers in three states. When he and Hall first teamed up just six years ago, Santic knew nothing about horse racing, and according to Hall, he still doesn't know much. "It makes him a very good owner. He doesn't tell me anything because he doesn't know," Hall said.
Regardless, the fisherman leapt head-first into racing's uncharted waters. Recalling the first time he met Santic, Hall said a mate told him he knew a bloke, a first-timer, who wanted to buy a horse. Hall agreed to meet the stranger at the Gold Coast sales. "We had each other's mobile number and kept ringing each other to meet. I ended up standing right next to this little bloke who looked like Rod Stewart. I thought this can't possibly be him," Hall said.
Santic's limit at the Gold Coast sale was $60,000. Hall stopped bidding at $120,000. Santic, never one to shirk, bought the horse, later named Smytzer's Falcon, for $150,000.
Smytzer's Falcon was fast but had a hole in her heart. She retired a maiden. Santic's indulgence was off to an inauspicious start.
He's since raced hundreds of "Smytzer" horses - so named because when Santic was 16, one of his Croatian mates couldn't say "pacer". "It sounded like smytzer," Santic said - and they've won countless races.
He now owns a stud near Geelong, not far from his father's old employer, the Ford factory. He breeds horses here and picks them out, with expert advice, around the world. Makybe Diva was bred and bought in England.
Santic bets hard. Earlier this week he took bookmakers for more than $1 million. "Just getting some of mine back," he said. A couple of years ago he paid a fortune at auction for Phar Lap's Cox Plate trophy.
For all the glamorous trimmings, Santic is still a private fisherman at heart. When he strolled down from the grandstand, he did so virtually anonymously. He works hard and rarely leaves Port Lincoln.
Santic is not a regular racegoer. He attended trackwork for the first time on Saturday, when Makybe Diva galloped at Werribee.
Decked out in the Port Adelaide Football Club colors - black suit, black-and-white tie and shirt - Santic was the odd man out in the fashion-conscious mounting yard, a striped fish out of water.
But Santic, not the slick-suited land-dwellers, was this year's Cup hero. For the others, the sheiks, the syndicates, the Singletons, this was the one that got away.