For 23 years, Alan Mills would spend two weeks in the summer looking up at the sky above Wimbledon. The match referee at The Championships of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club from 1982 until 2005, he had the task of deciding when to stop play.

So often was the event blighted by the weather that Mills became known as The Rain Man. His task was to order the covers onto the courts whenever rain threatened. Television screens all over the world pictured him with a walkie-talkie in hand, poised to make a decision.

However, that was not his only job. The calm Lancastrian had to deal with louder storms as well. One of the biggest that blew in was Jeff Tarango, a tempestuous American player who erupted at Wimbledon in 1995. Tarango, in battle against Alexander Mronz, accused the umpire, Bruno Rebeuh, of corruption and left the court, disqualifying himself from the tournament. Tarango knew he could not hit the umpire or he would be banned for life. Instead, his French wife Benedicte did it for him.

“The incident took over my entire weekend,” recalls Mills. “He just wouldn’t go away and kept talking and talking, explaining this, that and the other. Then there were the press conferences with his wife coming in having already slapped the chair umpire around the face.” Tarango was fined £40,000 and suspended for two Grand Slam events, including the next Wimbledon.

Other fiery players also took up the referee’s precious time. John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors were particularly prominent. “I was a little fortunate that they were coming to the end of their playing careers at Wimbledon. I didn’t get involved in any of the huge McEnroe debacles that went on and the big fines. It is sad that some will remember him only for his tantrums and not for his wonderful tennis.”

Mills was the assistant match referee in 1981 when McEnroe blew his top and called umpire Ted James “the pits of the world”. The referee had a more polite exchange after McEnroe hammered Connors 6-1 6-1 6-2 in the 1984 final. “I would go onto court to console the runner-up. You couldn’t talk to Jimmy because Jimmy was under his towel, absolutely gone. He couldn’t believe what had happened.

“I then went towards John, who had just come back from celebrating with his parents. I said, ‘Congratulations, John. That was the finest display of tennis I have seen. In my thinking you only made four unforced errors.’ He looked at me with his usual cheeky grin and said, ‘Alan, I think you are right but I make it two unforced errors and two bad bounces.’ That’s the sort of relationship we had at the end of it.

“On a given day, he was the most talented player I have seen. What he could do with a ball under his control was amazing. He didn’t have the huge serve of Pete Sampras or some other players but he had such an accurate serve. He could pick his time and had control when he got to the net. He didn’t really hit the ball hard, he placed it. He was a thinking player.”

Another troublemaker was Fritz Buehning, an American player. In 1983, he made an unusual request. “I had had a few problems with Fritz earlier in the week. When he lost, he came storming into the office. I had always said that my door was open to any player who had a problem. When he came in I wondered what he was going to do. He said, ‘I am going to be coming back to Wimbledon for a few years and I would like you not to hold what has happened this week against me. And, by the way, could we have some softer toilet paper in the changing rooms.’ We got the toilet paper changed.”

Mills believes that the players accorded him more respect than they had his predecessors because he had been a player himself. He represented Lancashire at senior county level when he was 17 and twice reached the last 16 at Wimbledon, losing to Australian Rod Laver. He also beat former champion Jarolslav Drobny in the mid 1950s.

“I was the first Englishman to beat Laver when he came over. It was at a tournament in Hurlingham. The tournament director had worked out that he was going to have a Rod Laver v Martin Mulligan final, two stars that had come from Australia. In the end, he had an Alan Mills v Bobby Wilson final, two Brits playing. That didn’t please him much.”

A baseline player, he was better suited to clay surfaces than grass. “My serve wasn’t my strongest weapon and clay gave me more time to play my shots.”

One performance on clay put him in the Guinness Book of Records. He is the only player not to lose a single game on his Davis Cup debut. He beat Joseph Offenheim of Luxembourg 6-0 6-0 6-0 in Mondorf-les-Bains in 1959.

“The Davis Cup captain was John Barrett who was sitting on the edge of the court. When it got to 5-0 in the first set, he said, ‘I bet you can’t win 6-0 6-0 6-0.’ I said, ‘Okay, why not.’

“We were paid £3 per day and the LTA paid for our evening meal. So we decided to bet our daily allowance of £3. At the next change over, he doubled the bet and by the time I got to 5-0 in the third set, the sum total of my expenses was riding on that one game. So I had to win. I earned in the region of about £25 or £30, which was quite a lot then.”

It was at Wimbledon, though, where he earned his meal ticket, particularly dealing with the weather. The club received their weather forecast directly from the BBC. Mills, responsible for finishing the tournament on time, used a more accurate measure. “We would get in touch with the cameraman on the BBC’s high hoist over the courts. He could see for two or three miles around because he was so high and he would tell us what was happening. If we saw him coming down, we knew then that we were in trouble.”

Mills would get on to his walkie-talkie and communicate with his office, which had a numbering system that was relayed to all the courts. Number two was bad news. It indicated that the courts should be covered.

Now 71, Mills is a highly regarded match referee and continues to officiate around the world. He has recently been to Miami, Tokyo, Dubai and Korea. He, and his wife Jill, also a former player, will return to Wimbledon in the next two weeks to watch the tennis and catch up with old friends.

And if the sun is shining? “We may go and play golf,” he says. “That was something I couldn’t do for all those years.”

— ESPN Classic, Sky Channel 442, will show their viewers’ choice of the top 10 Wimbledon matches at 7pm every day throughout the Wimbledon fortnight