Xavier "ChiefsAholic" Babudar in a hotel room interview for the Prime Video documentary "ChiefsAholic: A Wolf In Chiefs Clothing." Xavier “ChiefsAholic” Babudar in a hotel room interview for the Prime Video documentary “ChiefsAholic: A Wolf In Chiefs Clothing.” (Prime Video.)

Pivoting isn’t always about changing forms of media, changing careers, or even trying to maneuver a couch up a set of stairs. Sometimes, an individual media project undergoes a dramatic shift during its creation.

And that’s what happened to director Dylan Sires while he was making the documentary ChiefsAholic: A Wolf In Chiefs Clothing on Kansas City Chiefs superfan and serial bank robber Xavier Babudar.

The documentary, which premieres on Prime Video on Tuesday, covers the remarkable story of Babudar. Known for dressing in a wolf costume at Chiefs’ games and going by “Chiefsaholic,” Babudar was first arrested in December 2022 around a bank robbery in Oklahoma. He then skipped out on bail the following March, was arrested by the FBI in California that June, and was indicted on 19 charges involving robberies or attempted robberies of 11 financial institutions across seven states that added to more than $800,000.

This February, Babudar pled guilty to three charges (one count of money laundering, one count of transporting stolen property across state lines, and one count of bank robbery). And this September, he was sentenced to 17 years in jail. So that all makes for quite the story.

But, as Sires told AA in an interview ahead of this documentary’s premiere, he started on this project before Babudar’s bail skip. That included conducting interviews with him and getting footage of him watching the Chiefs’ win over the Philadelphia Eagles in February 2023’s Super Bowl LVII from a hotel room (where Babudar had a lot of bets placed, and told Sires he wound up winning $155,000 to support his family) while wearing an ankle monitor. And he had to radically re-envision the documentary when Babudar jumped bail, morphing the last part of it into an as-it-happened account of bail bondsman Michael Lloyd’s chase to try and track him down.

“We didn’t really think that was ever going to happen,” Sires said. “After we filmed with him the initial five days or six to seven days, he’s like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot on my mind, I don’t want to film for a while. I’ll be out on bail for a long time.’ So we go back up to Iowa, we’re out of things. And then I got a call from the bail bondsman that he had cut off his ankle monitor, and me and my producer were like, ‘Oh, heck.’

“So we just started driving at 10 o’clock at night. And at the time we were like, ‘Oh no, this doc’s just starting now.’ We thought we already had it in the bag, and it was reinventing itself. And we got to go film more, and it was pretty wild.”

A notable part of the documentary has Sires interviewing various other prominent Chiefs’ fans on their perspectives on Babudar. Sires said one, “Johnny B-Side,” provided the best perspective on how the Babudar story changed with that bail jump.

“What he says I think fits perfectly with what you asked, which is, like, ‘The story seems like it should be fake.’ That encapsulates the entire story. It’s like if you wrote this as a script, I think you might get laughed out of a room.”

But it is indeed real. And while the story has received plenty of coverage so far, including 41-minute ESPN SC: Featured mini-documentary Where Wolf earlier this year, part of what makes this ChiefsAholic project stand out is the access they got to Babudar before that bail skip. Sires said that came from his interest in Babudar’s story back when so little was known about it, which led to him emailing Babudar while he was in jail in Tulsa waiting to make bail.

“I just actually reached out to him at the Tulsa County Jail. I sent an email, and so we started going back and forth. And I told him I wanted to film a documentary on it, because at that point there were so many questions in the air about Xavier. And people were saying, you know, ‘Chiefsaholic, he’s innocent!’ And so I just wanted to see if this guy ever got out on bail if I could go and film with him and ask him questions and see who he was, because he was such a mysterious figure.”

Sires said his initial interest came from Chiefs fans friends telling him what they knew of the story at that point.

“I had received a text message from some of my friends in Kansas City. They’re Chiefs fans, and they had sent me a video, by Cole deRuse [who does the “How bout those CHIEFS” YouTube channel. I watched the video, and as a documentary filmmaker, the premise of the film is just incredible, right? You have a beloved superfan that goes missing, the football community responds concerned about his safety, and they find out, well, he’s in a Tulsa County jail for bank robbery.

“And there’s a lot of different little steps in there. Something that was very interesting to me was no one knew his name. You have this superfan, no one knew his name, no one really knew what he looked like. So there’s steps where you go from not knowing who this person is to finding out who he is, what he looks like, and then finding out he’s in a Tulsa County jail for bank robbery.

Sires said he was a bit surprised by Babudar in both appearance and demeanor when they first met in person.

“When I first saw him, when he first walked up and we had the cameras, he was an imposing figure, right? Like, he’s 6’2 or 6’3, 250. He’s a big guy, with just his physical presence. And he was kind of disarming, right? He was very respectful. He didn’t speak with a loud voice. So while he has this physically imposing stature, he was actually very kind, which kind of threw me off a little bit.”

Sires said Babudar was cagey, though, and a plan to build up to asking him about specific robberies didn’t quite work out.

“I don’t feel like we got to know him. Basically, when I first reached out to him, when I first heard about the story, I did some research and I found about three banks that I thought he had robbed. Because, remember, the narrative was, ‘Oh, he’s a serial bank robber.’ But no one really knew if he robbed any other banks. So I basically created a data set and figured out that there’s three possible banks that he had done, and one of them was where I was currently living in Des Moines. It was Des Moines, Clive, Iowa, and Omaha.

“And so when I started to reach out to him and develop a relationship and wanted to film with him, what I was really trying to do is get him to sit down for an interview so that at the end of the interview I could show him a series of pictures from bank robberies. 10 or 15 would obviously not be him at all, right? But the last three would be the three I had suspected were him. I wanted to see his reaction.

“So when he got out, we were talking with him, getting to know him, trying to build a rapport with him. I think he just might have been too clever or he just didn’t want to do a sit-down interview. So he avoided that.”

Sires did find Babudar more authentic when it came to his desire to support his family, especially his homeless mother and brother, and his claims that his bets and robberies were to try and help them.

“I did learn about his family and that he had been taking care of his family and that he had these big bets.”

ChiefsAholic is an interesting and unusual documentary on a number of levels. Those include that interview footage with Babudar mid-story, the cast of Chiefs’ fans commenting on Babudar and how big of a deal he was in their world, the interviews with other figures such as bondsman Lloyd and bank teller Payton Garcia (who successfully sued Babudar for physical and emotional distress caused by his actions) to its wildly-different elements covering sports, gambling, true crime, and a manhunt. Sires said he thinks that mix of elements is a boon to the story.

“I love that when you’re mixing genres. It’s a sports doc, it’s a true crime doc, it’s a doc doc too, where you’re following a story in real-time and you’re learning stuff. I love mixing the different genres into one. It was tricky to do, but we did it, and I think we did a good job.”

Sires said the last part of the doc, covering the hunt for Babudar as it unfolded, was particularly challenging. But that, and the whole idea of doing this documentary during some of its events, makes the film stand out from documentaries on long-past history.

“I think that’s what makes this project really unique. It’s like we’re not telling a story basically just from the interview, but we’re actually living in it, in the vérité of following it as the events are unfolding in real-time, and just capturing what we can.

“And I think that makes for a very valuable element to any viewer, you’re witnessing this as it happens. And as a filmmaker, this is what you love, this is why you do this, right? Because you’re following the story, it’s happening in real-time, it’s incredibly exciting. It’s an adventure. You don’t know what’s going to happen next, and it’s awesome.”

He said he’s hopeful the mixed genres will make ChiefsAholic appeal to a wide range of potential audiences.

“I think it highlights something about sports, about true crime, and about some of the underlying cracks in the system to some degree. And it’s wild. It’s just wild.”

ChiefsAholic: A Wolf In Chiefs Clothing is available to stream now on Prime Video. You can read our review here.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.