Not everyone gets to say goodbye like this

However, on January 23, 2019, he took the court one more time in a professional basketball league match. Kambala, representing the “Jūrmala”/”Betsafe” team, said goodbye to professional sports in a match against the Estonian champion team “Kalev”/”Cramo” from Tallinn.

Jurmalians suffered a loss in this match with the result 66:78 (19:16, 20:24, 14:15, 13:23). Although Kambala excelled with 20 points and six steals, he did not manage to end his career on a positive note.

After the match, the basketball player himself expressed his joy that he could end his professional career in sports in front of his loved ones.

“I hadn’t played for eight months, but I didn’t feel rusty. The main thing was to catch the feeling that I had played for the last time. It wasn’t difficult physically, because I trained in boxing twice a day, I just needed to catch the rhythm,” said Kambala at the time.

The former Latvian national basketball player started his professional career in 1994, representing the club “Rīgas Laiks”. He spent the best years of his career from 2001 to 2007, representing such European basketball heavyweights as “Real” Madrid, “UNICS” Kazan and “Fenerbahce” Istanbul.

Although Kambala has also played in Latvian amateur leagues, the match for the Jūrmala club can be considered his farewell to basketball.

If the loss experienced by Kambala’s team was still relatively small, Kaspars Gorkš, the basketball player’s namesake brother, left professional football with a serious beating.

In 2018, the long-time captain of the Latvian football team, Kaspars Gorkš, represented the club “Auda”, the second strongest league in Latvia. It was already announced that the match on August 18, 2018 against the “Daugavpils”/”Progress” team will be the last in Gorksha’s career.