Squatting behind the bumper of a Mitsubishi Lancer, preparing to lift the back end of the compact as many times as he can in 75 seconds to qualify as a contender for the title of World’s Strongest Man, Kevin Nee begins the lift looking like a raging, lumbering Hulk, a muscle-bound meathead blessed with considerably more brawn than brains. After all, in the clip of the 2009 competition already being circulated by fans the world over on YouTube, Nee is attempting the feat after barely healing from his second torn bicep in two years.

But there’s actually a great deal of thought behind the process, says the 24-year-old ASU grad and five-time WSM competitor. A great deal of consideration goes into even the most primal events in the annual international competition, considered the Super Bowl of the field known as strength athletics.

“The mental aspect of the sport goes much deeper than people think,” says Nee, who recalls feeling particularly “empty and powerless” in this past October’s competition on the Mediterranean island of Malta, having spent the first couple of days there battling fatigue and a fever. “Your mental state is very important.”

Sometimes Nee works through the stress of the competitions by concentrating on the technical aspects of the feat. There’s a “sticking point” in the car deadlift, for example, midway between the squat and the standing finish, where competitors need to exert the most force, he says, lest the weight of the car sends them doubling over. Additionally, he has to overcome worries about how his performance will be judged — not only by the officials, but by the legion of powerlifting purists always quick to blog their criticisms of strongman competitions for their relative lack of rules.

“There are a lot more rules in powerlifting,” he admits. “For one thing, in powerlifting, you’re not allowed to use straps,” he says, referring to the strips of durable webbing looped around the wrists and the weightlifting bar to increase grip, favored in the WSM but outlawed in the World Games sport of powerlifting. “Another thing they don’t allow is the ‘hitch,’ where the bar hits your thigh and you kind of ramp it up to counterbalance the weight. In strongman, we kind of have this attitude of, ‘If you can get the weight up, you get it up. We don’t care how you do it.’”

But mostly, Nee is thinking like a hero.

“If your kid is stuck under a car, it doesn’t matter how you get it off of him,” he says. “You get it off of him. That’s the kind of thing I think about when I’m getting psyched up for a big lift. You kind of play mind games with yourself, to get yourself pumped up. You think, ‘If I don’t lift this up, it’s going to crush my family.’”

Nee laughs, a little uncomfortable with the thought, but confident he has found a mental strategy that works. Others marvel at news of superhuman acts of heroism: the “subway superman” who dives onto train tracks to protect a stranger using his own body, or the firefighters who find strength to carry entire families to safety. Nee seems to eat those stories for breakfast, knowing that, if he ever does come upon a child pinned under a car or a heavy stranger who needs to be carried from a burning building, unlike most of us, he’ll actually be able to help.

That may explain why Nee always flashes his broad trademark smile each time he lifts the Mitsubishi high enough to stand with his back straight and strong.

“That’s the kind of thing I think about to give myself motivation,” Nee says. “That’s really what’s going through my head when I lift.”

Brainy Behemoth

Kevin Nee has a set spiel he likes to give students on his frequent visits to local elementary and middle schools.

“I like to talk to kids about being a student athlete,” he says. “How important it is to be educated. It’s great to want to be other things — an athlete, actor, singer, musician or whatever. But I find that true respect in this world comes from being an intelligent person. It doesn’t matter how good an athlete you are; if you’re an idiot, you’re never going to get respect. True respect comes from being an educated, intelligent person.”

It’s an effective message — particularly coming from a muscle man who, apart from holding a night job as a club bouncer while in college, where he eventually earned a degree in supply-chain management, has been able to support himself entirely on his physical strength, through sporting-gear sponsorships and tournament wins.

Nevertheless, Nee says that as soon as he finishes his speech, kids invariably raise their hands to ask the same questions of the man introduced to them as the youngest ever to compete in the World’s Strongest Man contest.

“They ask, ‘Can you lift a house?’ ‘Can you lift a building?’” laughs Nee, who earned that designation when, at the age of 20, he placed among the top 25 in the 2005 WSM tournament held in Chengdu, China. “I say, ‘No, but I could probably pull your school bus!’”

Surely the title alone is among the coolest to which any young male could aspire. Started in 1977 as an event for CBS TV, the World’s Strongest Man competition pits muscle men from around the globe in old-school Olympian contests with self-explanatory titles like the “Giant Log Lift,” “Truck Pull” and “Plane Pull,” the latter describing an event where contestants actually pull a 70-ton airplane across a 30-meter course, each competing for the shortest time.

Nee became involved in the sport almost by accident, when, as a skinny basketball star in his small hometown of Hopedale, Massachusetts, a weightlifter at the gym spotted Nee’s potential and signed him up for the regional qualifiers. Immediately, he became hooked.

But Nee never quite signed on for the stereotypical weightlifter’s attitude, which he regards as “really arrogant” and generally a few notches beneath his own level of intelligence.

“You know, I’ve never really been in that crowd,” he says. “I grew up in a really small town, and we didn’t have cliques — there really weren’t enough kids to have cliques in my high school. So if you were a jock, you were hanging out with the nerds and the hippies, too!”

A part-time guitar player who confesses to having caught every Dave Matthews concert on the East Coast before moving to Arizona to attend college, Nee says the best part of being in the World’s Strongest Man competitions are the all-expenses-paid trips to foreign lands. Since his first competition in 2005, Nee has been to Chengdu and Sanya in China and Valletta, Malta — not to mention several trips to Poland, where the WSM, and Nee, have a tremendous following, even in rougher, more manly cultures like those in the former Eastern Bloc.

“Over there, you don’t see a lot of guys going to the nightclubs and worrying about how their pink shirts will look with their collars popped,” says Nee, who admits he sees a lot of that around PV Mall, where he shares an apartment with his girlfriend.

“It’s not really our fault in our country that we primarily only speak English, because that’s what most schools push,” he says. “But I feel arrogant sometimes, and ignorant, when I go to other countries and I make people speak English in their own country. So what I try to do is learn at least a phrase or two every time I’m in a different country.”

Arrogance and ignorance — two traits commonly applied to men in Nee’s field that this particular strongman consciously avoids.

Ticking Time Bomb

When Nee was featured on the MTV reality show True Life in 2005, he won instant fame as the youngest competitor to ever take part in the World’s Strongest Man championship. In 2007, Men’s Fitness magazine named Nee among the world’s “25 Fittest Men,” joining the company of athletes like Lebron James and Larry Fitzgerald and entertainers Justin Timberlake and Akon.

Today, however, at 24 Nee is no longer the new kid on the block on the World’s Strongest Man circuit. “There are some kids younger than me entering the competition, but so far no one younger than me has won it,” says Nee. The pressure to become the youngest ever to take the first-place title has been Nee’s driving force over the past five years, the compulsion pushing him to return to the gym only three days after popping his bicep in a tractor tire-flipping event and trekking to Malta while suffering from flu-type symptoms.

But right now, Nee insists he’s comfortable taking it a little easier, cutting back on his six-day-a-week training ritual and gearing up for what he’s calling his “comeback” in 2010.

“Most guys in this sport don’t hit their peak until they get between the ages of 28 and 32,” Nee says. “So I’ve still got a ways to go before I reach my prime. And I do plan to dominate.”

In the meantime, he’s putting his ASU business degree to use by launching a website, NeeRX.com, hawking clothing and bodybuilding supplements and featuring daily Twitter-style updates on his training routines and thoughts. He’s also supporting his Phoenix-based sponsor Fighter’s Fuel, an adult version of the infant hydration formula Pedialyte — the secret beverage more popular than Gatorade among the muscle set, Nee claims.

As for that other supplement Nee says he’s constantly asked about, the 6-foot-2, 260-pound athlete insists he’s never used anabolic steroids, although he doesn’t deny the performance-enhancing substances are used throughout his profession.

“I’m not gonna say it doesn’t go on in this sport. If it goes on in baseball, why wouldn’t it in strength athletics?” he says. “But none of the athletes talk about it — and why would they, when it’s almost like a witch hunt in sports today?”

Still, Nee insists his personal bulk is due more to the rich foods served by his full-bred Italian mother and the occasional late-night gorges at the recently-closed Mickey’s Hangover in Scottsdale.

“I want to be a role model for kids,” he professes. “And what kind of role model are you if you end up in the papers for using steroids?