(No, this is not about me, but that's how I learned that concept in the first place. This is endemic to the Super Bowl and to a Chiefs superfan.)
ESPN, today, did an interesting article. It's on a well-known Chiefs superfan, the fan in the wolf suit, going to almost every game he could find (home and road). Sound familiar?
Xavier Babudar represented himself as a high-riding, freewheeling superfan who would go the extra mile for just about anybody.
The truth, however, is far different. And, for that truth, he now sits in an Oklahoma jail, heading to prison. Robbery, and perhaps far worse.
Babudar was more than willing to be generous and attend many sporting events, often luring prime seating. The ESPN story notes about taking a friend and his girlfriend to courtside seats at a Phoenix Suns game.
His Twitter account had over 45,000 followers.
But those who knew him and his family knew a far different story.
First, his family was homeless. They lived out of a car and routinely, according to police reports, committed petty theft.
A number of times, local police were called to banish them from various places of business for suspicion of shoplifting, or proof thereof same.
There was so much (purportedly stolen) merchandise in his car, that people openly wondered how three full-grown adults could fit in the thing at all, much less to sleep.
The only consistent address it appeared anyone could find on him or his parents was a mail drop -- and, often, they could be seen, in gloves, taking out mail in plastic bags.
Babudar would often don the wolf costume he was famous for miles from the Chiefs stadium, choosing to walk there instead of paying the $65 parking fee near the stadium.
Part of his online persona was that he was a rags-to-riches story, graduating from Kansas State in 2016 -- no record exists of his presence at the university.
He said he managed multiple warehouses in the Midwest... Nope, he worked for Amazon for seven months during the 2017 season and probably got himself in enough trouble, he quit before he was fired.
He definitely was homeless by the day of December 13th of last year. On that date, he approached an Oklahoma credit union and demanded "the 100's"... He got $150,000 of them and fled on a bike. He scared the poor teller so badly she has been unable to work since.
Yeah, this is REALLY sounding familiar!!!!
Read the article. It basically is a litany of petty crime by a family who got foreclosed, never had any real money, and resorted to various petty thefts and frauds...
So, then, how was Babudar able to afford prime seats at Chiefs games? Attending Super Bowl LIV in Miami in 2020???
People have been asking. One avenue appears to be a stiff gambling habit. One bet was $80,000 in a Kansas casino for the Chiefs to beat the Bills earlier in the season (they didn't). Another was $5,000 for the Chiefs to win Super Bowl LVII and another $5,000 for Mahomes to be the MVP of the league for the season.
The article goes no further than to list some of the bets he was supposedly part of. So what I am proposing is a conjecture only: He was a bag-man, much like the author of The Smart Money, for a consortium attempting to tamper lines and the like in manners which would not be legal if they did it themselves...
Right now, he is out on $80,000 bail -- though the teller and her lawyer are working feverishly to get that bail revoked. I hope they succeed, for one reason: If he's not such a bag-man, as I proposed above, I will go so far as to state I don't believe that's the only bank he's robbed...
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See the title of this post as the central point of it.
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