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 thru 2018, the series will be sponsored by Emirates Airline.
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. CBS and Tennis Channel also cover portions of The Series. Players earn points according to their results in the events; more points are awarded at ATP World Tour Masters 1000 and WTA Premier 5 events. The three male and three female players with the highest point totals each earn a bonus at the US Open. The amount depends on their US Open Series placement and US Open result. If both are won then the bonus is $1 million as of 2010. Lleyton Hewitt and Lindsay Davenport were the top point-getters in 2004, Andy Roddick and Kim Clijsters won in 2005, and Andy Roddick and Ana Ivanović won in 2006. Defending US Open champions Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova won in 2007.
In 2005, whereas Roddick was upset in the first round against Gilles Müller at the Open, Clijsters became the first person to win $2.2 million (the largest payday ever in women's sports) by beating Frenchwoman Mary Pierce in straight sets: 6–3, 6–1. In 2010 she won $2.2 million again, this time $1.7 million for the US Open title and $500,000 in bonus for second place in the US Open Series.
In 2007, Federer won the US Open series and went on to win the US Open, winning $1.4 million plus the US Open Series bonus of $1 million, bringing his prize winning total to $2.4 million. This tops Clijsters' $2.2 million as the biggest US Open payday ever.
Read more about US Open Series: Past Standings and Their Performance On The US Open, Records
Famous quotes containing the words open and/or series:
“The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)
“Every day the fat woman dies a series of small deaths.”
—Shelley Bovey, U.S. author. Being Fat Is Not a Sin, ch. 1 (1989)