Claim: Martina Hingis was on TV.

The US Open Series is the seven-week summer tennis season linking twelve ATP World Tour and WTA Tour tournaments together . The Series leads to the US Open . It is often referred to as the U.S. or North American hard court season . From 2012 until 2018 , the series will be sponsored by Emirates .   It was organized in 2004 as a way to focus more attention on American tennis tournaments by getting more of them on domestic television . Until 2004 , most summer North American tournaments were not on television , the exceptions being the highly televised ATP World Tour Masters 1000 events in Canada and Cincinnati .   The eight non-Masters tournaments now enjoy about 50 hours of television combined -- about two hours on each day of their final weekends , chiefly on ESPN2 , which is where ESPN shows its tennis programming .