For the past several years, the Kansas City Chiefs have been a pop-culture ever-present. Between the team’s on-field success and the dynamic duo of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce dominating the headlines, the back-to-back Super Bowl champions are impossible to overlook.
But there was a less-conventional Chiefs-related story that reached the masses. And it centered on a (literal) masked man known as ChiefsAholic.
Xaviar Babudar, who attended KC games in a full-body wolf suit under the identity of ChiefsAholic, initially seemed like the sort of larger-than-life character you can find in every fanbase. He was at seemingly every game and became a minor celebrity in his own right, posing for photos and catching the attention of TV cameras. But then, one day, everything unraveled.
After a period of social media silence that initially worried Chiefs fans, it turned out that Babudar had been arrested after allegedly robbing a credit union. And while that already sounded unbelievable, the story didn’t end there. ESPN wrote a lengthy investigative story, exploring the contradictions of a man who attended Chiefs games as a minor celebrity and placed big-time bets while claiming to be homeless. But even that wasn’t the end of the tale.Babudar later removed his ankle monitor while out on bail and fleed for months, earning himself a place on the Greater Kansas City Crime Stoppers’ most wanted list.
He was eventually handed a 17 1/2-year prison sentence without parole and three years of supervised release.
And while the saga can sound like something a Hollywood writing room would reject for being too unbelievable, it has now made it to film form. Prime Video recently released “ChiefsAholic-A-Wolf-In-Chiefs-Clothing,” a true-crime documentary featuring interviews granted by Babudar.
With that in mind, Newsweek spoke with director Dylan Sires ahead of the documentary’s release about the challenges of such a project, football fandom and more.
Sam Greenwood/Getty Images
Newsweek: So, yeah, I guess from the start…how did this ChiefsAholic project come to be? Because I know doing a documentary about a bank-robbing football fan in a wolf suit isn’t exactly a project on everyone’s bucket list.
Dylan Sires: Definitely not. This started when I had gotten a text from some friends from Kansas City who were big Chiefs fans and, you know, they’re always sending me ideas.
And they sent me this idea of, you know, ChiefsAholic because he had just been apprehended or arrested in Tulsa County or Bixby, he was in a Tulsa County Jail. So they sent me a text. ‘You do your next doc on this.’ And so I was like, ‘What’s this? And so, I looked through it, and the more and more I looked, I was like, ‘Wow, this is a wild story.’
And there’s still a lot of mystery, right? And so that’s when I decided, I was like, ‘You know, I’m going to try to do a documentary on this.’
NW: Awesome. And you just touched on this a little bit, but I know it’s kind of a cliche that whenever an unbelievable scenario comes up, there’s always the line of, ‘That would be rejected from a screenplay because it’s just too [out there].’
So, I know you kind of touched on it, but did you ever have any moments like that when you’re untangling this whole saga and, from a directorial perspective, almost saying, ‘Hey, I couldn’t write this if I tried?’
DS: Yeah, and, you know, I mean, when he cut off his ankle monitor and ran. That was one point when I was just like, ‘This is like cliche, but at the same time it’s like tragic and crazy.’ It was like ‘What is going on?’
But then the other time that I had one of those moments was, you know, when were with [bail bondsman] Michael Lloyd the day he had to pay the bail for Xaviar’s bond. And, you know, we were assuming he was going to be pretty, you know, ticked off. And so obviously we wanted to film that.
And it just so happens the day that he pays the bail, the $80,000 for Xaviar’s bond, they catch Xaviar in Sacramento on the same day. So, like, if you tried to write that, no one would accept that. They’d be like, ‘Yeah, this is too, it’s unrealistic. It’s fake. This will never happen in real life. It’s gotta be believable.’ And it was. It literally just happened. So that was a pretty wild moment.
NW: I had this saved for a little later, but you brought it up. So, I guess we’ll go there right now. I know there was the story with cutting off the ankle monitor, him going on the run in the midst of filming, all that.
So, can you tell me a little bit about just what happened there and what’s going through your mind as that’s all unfolding?
DS: Oh, yeah. You know, I got a call. I think I was at my sister’s house. I was hanging out. Get a call from Michael Lloyd. “Xaviar has cut off his ankle monitor.” And I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, man.” Because Michael Lloyd jokes a lot, so I didn’t know if he was messing with us. He’s like, “No, I’m dead serious.”
And so, I immediately called my producer. You know, it’s now 10:00 on a Saturday night, and we’re like, “Get in the car.” We pile in, we drive down to Kansas City. We meet up with the bail bondsman because he’s, you know, he’s following [Babudar’s] mother and the brother, right, because the family’s so tight-knit that if you want to find him, that’s, you have to stick with the mother and the brother. That was wild.
And then we spent two weeks in a car, two or three weeks, because we would go back periodically when things are developing throughout that whole, you know, while he was on the lam. But yeah, people think being, you know, that kind of stuff is fun, but it’s ultimately very boring most of the time. Like 99 perceent of the time, you’re just sitting in a car.
And it’s kind of funny because the bail bondsman, he was trying to get me into cryptocurrencies and XRP and stuff like that cause he’s a big NFT, XRP guy. So, he’s like always talking about that. And, you know, it was fun.
NW: Similarly, when you were making this sort of documentary, I’d imagine it brings up all sorts of unique challenges that you might not have encountered before. You can’t exactly plan for you someone being on bail and all the wrangling that comes with that, just all the contradictions of the story that you’re touching on, obviously, a more sensitive subject matter with bank robberies and the trauma and things like that that come with it.
So, yeah, just for you as a director, how do you sort of navigate all those unique hoops you have to jump through while still telling the story you want to tell?
DS: Well, I mean, let’s face it, what Xaviar had done when he robbed those banks, they were violent bank robberies. Jumping the counter screaming, you know, threatening the life of someone. And he’s not a little person. He’s a big guy. And, you know, he’s got a lot of energy. So, you know, he was a pretty scary individual when he would go in and rob those banks. And so, it was important when we were making the film that we would also offer the side of, you know, who I think is the heart of the film is Payton Garcia, who was one of the victims.
She’s kind of what I’d say, the antidote to, you know, all the sensational aspects of the story because, you know, the story itself is sensational. And I think sometimes, what can be lost in that is maybe the human cost. Right?
Because it’s like, ‘Oh a superfan that dressed up like a wolf is robbing banks to go to Chiefs games.’ It’s a crazy, funny premise.
But then when you kind of dive into the layers and the people who are behind those stories, it definitely gives you a perspective that, yeah, really checks you from the sensational aspects of the story.
NW: Yeah, for sure. And I would have to imagine A-1 on your list when you’re doing a project like this is not glorifying the crimes, not making it seem cool or anything like that….That has to be the first thing on your list to kind of check off, right?
DS: Yeah. I mean, what was written in the police reports is how we tried to film the recreation, which was, you know, to make them stark…they were not glorifying them whatsoever. You know, this is a dude who would beeline into a bank and pull out a, you know, what we know now was a BB gun.
But to the bank tellers, to the people working at the bank, you can’t, you don’t know difference between a real gun and a BB gun. To them, lives are being threatened, and we wanted to film it that way, you know, to show how brutal what he did when he went into these bank [was].
NW: And I think what you brought up about Payton Garcia as sort of the antidote is just really cool. And I think that makes perfect sense based on what you’re talking about.
So, I guess, again, from your directorial perspective, how did you go about sort of weaving those two narratives together? I guess like you said, you sort of have the negative stuff and the antidote. How did you approach walking that tightrope or balancing those two things?
DS: Yeah. So, I mean, when we were filming with Xaviar and he’s kind of disarming, right? He’s polite, he’s nice, you know he’s somewhat soft spoken. He’s not like, you see, his physical presence, and he does have an imposing physical presence. But, you know, personality-wise, you know, you wouldn’t necessarily see this person as being a bank robber or, you know, a violent person at all.
So, when we’re filming with him or directing him or making this, it’s, it’s like you see him and then we complicated it with Payton’s story. Right? So, it’s kind of juxtaposing like how he presents himself in the film or to us as we’re filming him and making sure that we butt up against that [with] Payton’s story.
So, you have the proper context of, ‘Hey, I might start to like this guy,’ but then you hear Payton’s story and, you’re like, ‘Wait, wait a minute. I don’t know, this is pretty brutal, what he did.’ So I mean, that’s how I tried to weave, you know, all the things together, so that someone would have an honest look at the story and what had happened.
NW: Something else I was wondering, in regard to sort of butting up against the Xaviar narrative is I know in the trailer, one of the lines that really stuck in my head was someone saying something like, ‘He was like a god among Chiefs fans’ or something along those lines.
And yeah, I was just curious if in the trajectory of filming…did you ever sort of feel that yourself, like, ‘Oh, I mean, I kind of getting drawn in here. I’ve got to make sure that I butt up against this and I keep it balanced’ since, yeah, like you said, it’s such a compelling story. It’s such a narrative you can almost get lost in if you’re not careful.
DS: Yeah. I mean, when you think about Xaviar’s story, I mean, you know, as a human being, sometimes you hear he’s homeless, he’s chronically homeless and lived out of a car and took care of his family and things like that.
You know, it does give you pause a little bit, and you want to feel bad for him, but at the end of the day, he’s an adult, right? And you’re responsible for the things that you do and the actions that you take. One of the things that I think is really unique and great about the film is that we have cause and effect.
We have actions and reactions, and we see those play out in real time throughout the film where Xaviar may make a decision, and then later it comes back on him, right?
NW: And I think we can probably get you out here on this one, but I know [that] obviously fandom is something that comes up throughout the project.
Obviously, Xaviar himself. You have the other super fans who are sort of the lead hook of the trailer. Like I said, you have the line about him being a god among fans and all that stuff. And I know it’s easy to sort of look at sports and sort of see the silliness of it. Like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re all watching a bunch of men wrestle for, football for three hours and then we go home,’ you know?
So, I was just wondering if dealing with these people, of being so immersed in it, telling this story, those sorts of things, did you come away from this with a different perspective on fandom, a new idea about these super fans, anything like that?
DS: Yeah. Big time. You know, I hadn’t really, you know, went to very many games in my life, let alone a professional football game or went to a tailgate.
So to learn about, you know, this subculture of fandom is pretty illuminating. And, you know, super fans are basically, you know, I think what they would call themselves is they’re like leaders of the crowd. Right? They, in the football game, they help like, get everyone to yell, to cheer, to maybe like be too loud, so it’s too loud in the stadium, right, to the opposing team’s quarterback to make a call and he can’t hear.
So you know, learning all about that and there’s so many layers and so many things going on and you know, yeah, it was definitely awesome. And, you know, all the Chiefs people, all the fans that we talked to were absolutely open and honest and lovely and were a great resource for not only trying to research the film but, you know, when asking them questions about their stories and, you know, the things they knew about ChiefsAholic or the things they didn’t know because, you know, this guy was very mysterious.
