‘Chiefsaholic’ documentary unsettles our understanding of a superfan gone wild

On Dec. 24, Amazon Prime released “Chiefsaholic: A Wolf in Chiefs Clothing,” charting the fame of Xavier Babudar, who rose to celebrity as a Kansas City Chiefs fan costumed each game as a wolf, before being arrested for bank robbery. The story became only more bonkers after his arrest: allegations of serial bank robberies on the way to Chiefs away games, an escape from law enforcement and more than $1 million in gambling to launder stolen money.

Babudar’s story was headline news for months before it was the “Chiefsaholic” documentary.

The storyline is a jackpot for the algorithmic recommendations of streaming television. Sports? Yes. True crime? Yes. A hidden identity built on lies? Yes.

And what if the sport was football? Even more specifically, Kansas City Chiefs football? And what if the true crime was a tale of serial bank robber hiding behind a mask — both during the heists and in real life?

The novelty of Babudar’s story combined with the movie’s in-depth documentary approach create a fun, if complicated, watch.

“Chiefsaholic,” like most contemporary documentaries, relies on access. In this respect, the producers deliver. Most importantly, they persuade Babudar to sit for interviews and to observe his life after he is released on bail. The camera watches him as he cheers for the Chiefs in the 2023 Super Bowl. He’s desperate for a win, both to see his favorite team crowned champions, but also to cash in a lucrative sports gamble for them.

In these moments, he reveals himself as profane and immature, trash talking his imagined doubters with tirades and celebrations pointed at the camera. This access allows us to know the man behind the mugshots.

The swirl of people surrounding Babudar further enriches the documentary. We meet Michael Lloyd, the mercurial and indefatigable bondsman who is on the hook for $80,000 if he can’t track down the suspect. The woman who stood at the end of Babudar’s fake pistol during his final bank robbery in Oklahoma, Payton Garcia, is a vulnerable and moral counterweight to the sports-fueled bravado of Chiefsaholic and his fellow self-proclaimed superfans.

Only Babudar’s mother, Carla Baduban, and her other son keep the camera distant — but alluringly so. Through the telephoto lens, Carla seems a tragic and withered woman who lives a nomadic and troubled life. Seeing her from a distance, we viewers speculate about how Xavier Babudar’s upbringing with her might have led to his federal jail cell.

By the end, the cast of characters feels outlandishly complex. The documentary veers away from a silly sports romp that you might have anticipated when you clicked on something called “Chiefsaholic” with promotional images featuring a football fan costumed as a wolf.

To counter this weight, the program delivers upbeat and goofy moments as well. Montages — almost too many to count — provide recaps of Chiefs’ wins and social media reactions. The quick-cut pace brings levity. Backed by TechN9ne’s song “Chiefs Kingdom,” game footage and social media screenshots remind us of the events leading to the Chiefs’ rise and Babudar’s fall.

The movie also relies on reenactments of Babudar’s crimes, as well as other events. In addition to relying on the actual bodycam footage of his arrest, the producers staged scenes that imagine aerial shots of the police cars speeding to the scene, details of his booking and fingerprinting and more. These staged set pieces distract us from the archival footage and the real people. These scenes (along with the ever-present montages) lard up the storytelling and push the movie’s runtime to 115 minutes, when 90 minutes could likely have fully and tautly told the story.

Besides the connection to our favorite NFL team, the movie offers other connections to Kansas. Babudar claims to have graduated in 2016 from Kansas State University, although no one in the documentary seems to believe that. Babudar often visits Kansas casinos, making wagers on the Chiefs and, the FBI alleged, laundering the money from his bank robberies.

As his bail bondsman and law enforcement chase him, the movie shows locations in Kansas City. (Coincidently, these areas are within a few miles of another recent KC-based documentary: the “Payday” episode of “Dirty Money” in 2018.) While the documentary is a tour of the Midwest, from Oklahoma to Minnesota, much of it plays out in Kansas.

The documentary ups the production values and stylistic choices over another Chiefsaholic documentary, ESPN’s “Where Wolf” from 2023. In “Chiefsaholic,” director Dylan Sires smartly chooses and lights locations for his interviews. When social media posts are displayed to help tell the story, Sires adds a pixelated effect. In these moments, the style reminds us of the barrier between real life and online life. Those pixels add subtle skepticism, asking: “What is real life?”

This is the strongest theme in the documentary. If NFL superfans are only celebrities when when they dress up for a game, if people don’t recognize them in real life and if people don’t even know their real names, then what is their fame? Whether in a wolf mask or another costume, superfans in this movie aren’t who they pretend to be.

“Chiefsaholic” showcases the trapping of superfans: the extravagant makeup, the social media trash talking, the customized buses, the curated online profiles. It investigates why these people are driven to embrace a team so completely. However, it can only hint at the answer to that question, and only for one person: Babudar.

The most revealing scene with Babudar comes as he watches the 2023 Super Bowl. He talks gently about how he must provide for his mom and brother. But then, fueled by the Chiefs gear he is wearing and the game on the TV, his persona swerves as he revs up to game mode. The superfan performance returns. For the benefit of the camera and thousands of miles from the actual game, he is “Chiefsaholic” again, announcing his return on social media.

As one Chiefs fan says in the movie: “I don’t have any problem with these people having alternate personas. The problem is when the persona becomes the purpose. Versus the purpose being the game.”

This fan could have been commenting on how regular people, especially young men fueled by online sports gambling and social media, transform when they put on their superfan costumes for game day and risk their money on football games.

In this way, the movie suggests that people’s alternate personas — the ones doing the most harm — might be online. People who follow Babudar online can’t cope with his guilt, despite the evidence.

In another scene, Garcia, the bank teller who was threatened by Babudar, explains her frustration at people supporting Chiefsaholic by believing his innocence. She wonders how people could so easily jump online to glibly assert his innocence, after he had threatened her life. Why take his side over hers? Her tears of sadness before the camera show how blind allegiance online — often posted for laughs — can wound real people.

By the end of the movie, we wonder how much sympathy we should have for Babudar, a person who most of us only knew online.

In exploring our willingness for sympathy, the documentary succeeds. It tells a well-known story in a way that still provides tension. We know that he will be arrested, that he will flee and that he will be found again.

But we don’t know how we will feel about him, and where we will place the blame for this bizarrely American story of true crime tangled with sports.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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