I played tennis with my friend almost daily, and as my commitment and rate of improvement increased, we reduced it to two or three times a week on average. He's improved too but since there's a skill gap, we don't play standard matches with serves, we play an informal format "21." Since the format's scoring starts after three rallies, there's a level of ambiguity with how to start the point in a fair manner, so I just look at it as practice that happens to have a scoring system to have more of an incentive.
However, he takes losing this very seriously, most recently dismissing my win as cheese and insinuating I used gamesmanship to win by constructing a point with the first few rallies instead of just starting it normally. He was clearly angry since he started rallies by hitting the ball extremely hard and sacrificing any semblance of accuracy ("I no longer want you to use the rally start as an advantage"). I ended the session early and told him we shouldn't play anymore.
He's exhibited sore loser behavior before - spitting on the court, threw his racket once, and quit a couple of scored sessions early before. It's somewhat a double standard I'm holding, since I've many times been in a sour mood playing with him, but it's only in a self-critical manner and I try not to express it unless he asks how I'm doing (I'll respond with something like "my form is shit and I'm mistiming everything").
I've been friends with him for about 20 years since we were kids/neighbors, so I feel I notice little things more like when he tries to rattle me on the tennis court despite accusing me of gamesmanship later. Part of why my patience was worn thin is because the sport is most fulfilling to me when I'm playing proper matches with a variety of people. It feels unreasonable when he expects to play multiple times a week while also pulling these antics.
What might be a good way to follow through on not playing together anymore, while ideally not sabotaging our long friendship?
