A six-foot Sparky the Sun Devil is taking shape brick by brick in a Phoenix home workshop, and when it's finished, it'll stand watch inside a brand-new sports store on Mill Avenue. The builder is Tim Gomez, an Arizona State University faculty associate who has spent several hours a day piecing together the sculpture out of Lego bricks.
Gomez, a 2015 ASU graduate now teaching in the university's Watts College of Public Service & Community Solutions, was commissioned by sports apparel retailer Rally House to create the statue, according to Rally House. The sculpture requires roughly 35,000 Lego pieces, and it's scheduled to make its official public debut inside the store during ASU's Homecoming in November, as reported by KHOU-TV. FOX 10 Phoenix's Steve Nielsen, who first brought the build to wider attention, described the project as a giant Lego Sparky mascot in a report for FOX 10 Phoenix, which put the piece count at 30,000, a figure slightly below the 35,000 cited elsewhere.
Outside the classroom, Gomez runs a custom building studio called Timmy's Brick Lab, and this isn't his first attempt at translating ASU's mascot into plastic bricks. In late 2025, he built a 15,000-piece Lego wall mural of Sparky that was highlighted by ASU's official social channels, and in December 2024 he constructed a five-foot handheld ASU pitchfork out of yellow and maroon Legos ahead of the football team's Peach Bowl appearance, a project that took about a month to design and assemble, per the same account.
Why Rally House Chose Mill Avenue
The six-foot Sparky will land at Rally House's second Tempe location, which officially opened on Mill Avenue near the ASU campus on Thursday. The retailer selected the district specifically to deepen its connection with the university community, and the store sells licensed collegiate gear and Arizona sports merchandise aimed squarely at Sun Devil fans.
That opening lines up with a broader commercial push along the corridor. The Downtown Tempe Authority tracked a wave of new retail shops, ice cream parlors, and dining concepts opening between 5th and 7th Streets alongside Rally House in mid-2026, and the Gillette Group has framed the activity as part of a year that downtown Tempe leadership designated for major business expansion aimed at capturing student foot traffic.
A Mascot With Decades of Local Lore
Sparky's roots run deep at ASU. The university's teams were originally known as the Bulldogs until November 8, 1946, when the student body voted 819 to 196 to adopt the Sun Devil as the official mascot, according to Arizona State University. The character's now-iconic look was designed in the late 1940s by former Disney animator and ASU alumnus Berk Anthony, with the live costumed mascot making its stadium debut in 1951; university accounts note Anthony reportedly based Sparky's facial features on his former boss, Walt Disney.
Sparky's role on game day has stayed physical over the decades. A long-standing tradition requires the live mascot to perform one push-up on the football field for every cumulative point the Sun Devils have scored after a touchdown, and Sparky also traditionally stomps the opposing team's bus before home games, per ASU. Fans headed to Mountain America Stadium have their own newer tradition nearby: since September 2025, Tempe has run a game-day water taxi service across Tempe Town Lake, ferrying fans on 11-passenger boats from north-side spots to avoid vehicle traffic near campus, according to Cronkite News.
Once complete, Gomez's brick Sparky will join that mix of tradition and reinvention on Mill Avenue, a permanent fixture greeting shoppers in a store built for Sun Devil pride. The statue's Homecoming debut gives Gomez a firm deadline for what stands as his most ambitious 3D build yet.
