When Greg Whiteley was 19 he ventured from his hometown, Bellevue, Wash., to spread the word of the Mormon church on Navajo reservations in the Southwest. At first he would come in hot, as the kids say, eager to knock on doors and proselytize.

“Frequently the thing I’d ask was, ‘Do you have time to hear a message about Jesus Christ today?’ ” he recalled during a video interview this month from his Southern California home. “And the answer 99 times out of 100 was, ‘No, I do not have time for that.’ I think I spent the first months of my mission talking at people, and it was a very discouraging experience.”

Gradually, however, he learned to shut up and listen. “I was amazed at how quickly people would disclose the most vulnerable things at a doorstep within 90 seconds of meeting them,” Whiteley said. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was preparing himself for a successful career as a documentary filmmaker.

Today, Whiteley, 53, is best known for creating, producing and directing immersive, off-the-beaten-path, underdog sports docuseries for Netflix, including “Last Chance U,” “Cheer” and his latest, “Wrestlers,” which premiered Wednesday. All are notable for what they are not: manipulative, sensationalist, opportunistic.

Whiteley finds subjects that offer maximum access and editorial control. “It’s really hard to get that from the New England Patriots,” he said. In other words, this isn’t “Hard Knocks,” the HBO series that purports to offer revealing behind-the-scenes stories from NFL training camps. For “Last Chance U,” which premiered in 2016, Whiteley focuses on individual community college football and basketball teams. In “Cheer,” the subject is a Texas community college cheerleading squad that happens to be a national dynasty. And for “Wrestlers,” Whiteley and his 20-person crew descended upon Ohio Valley Wrestling, a scrappy, underfunded professional wrestling company, with a passionate, blue-collar fan base, based in Louisville, Ky. Famous OVW alumni include John Cena and Paul Wight (who wrestled as Big Show), but the company has maintained an authentic little-guy personality.

“Wrestlers” is vintage Whiteley. He identified a few dynamic lead characters, including Al Snow, the fiercely dedicated, disarmingly thoughtful former WWF (later the WWE) wrestler and current minority owner and day-to-day manager of OVW, who sees wrestling as a means of telling great stories preferably for television; Matt Jones, the aggressively opinionated OVW co-owner and sports radio personality, focused on touring and keeping the company afloat financially; and HollyHood Haley J, a rebellious (and often irresponsible) young wrestler who is one of OVW’s most popular performers and drives Snow mad with her propensity to smoke weed on the gym premises.

Whiteley and his crew settled in and familiarized themselves with the operation. Perhaps most important, he quickly established that he wasn’t trying to burn anyone or manufacture the gotcha moments that fuel reality TV, which those on both sides of the camera are adamant that “Wrestlers” is not.

“There was a great deal of trust,” Snow said in a video interview from his home office. “Professional wrestling as a whole has always been a very closed, very secular business, never open, especially not to the general public and especially not in this manner. It was a tough decision for me to let this happen and be involved in it. But meeting Greg, I really got the idea and the impression that he was going to treat it with respect and he was going to be honest.”

The trust is largely a byproduct of Whiteley’s patience. He doesn’t push things, preferring instead to burrow in and hang out and get to know his subjects; “Wrestlers” was shot over a period of 31/2 months. His ideal is to disappear, or at least create the illusion that he has. He wants his three camera teams constantly rolling film — unless his subjects tell them to stop, in which case they generally do. This, in turn, reinforces the trust level. He tells stories by spending countless hours with his characters, not by asking hot-take questions about drug abuse and romantic problems (both of which are present in “Wrestlers”).

Whiteley is always after what is real, which in this case sets up a rich irony: a painstakingly authentic look at an endeavor often derided for being fake.