Down the Rabbit Hole in Montreal

This week on “Retired Librarian Goes Down the Rabbit Hole:” on the Season One finale of the CBS sitcom “Ghosts,” the main characters play a game of pickleball vs. their neighbors at a “country club” on a beautiful, indoor badminton court (pickleball courts don’t have alleys).

It’s a short scene, but I had to discover where this court was located. The show’s IMDB page was no help and after way too long spent reading fan discussion groups and skimming cast member Instagram accounts, all I had found was that the show is primarily filmed in Montreal. Eventually, I stumbled across a site that does a screen capture of the show every few seconds. Using one of those images, I did several reverse image searches, but only discovered that this image of a “country club” was also used by SNL in a 2017 skit.

After multiple futile searches on Montreal badminton and pickleball, I finally did an image search for “country clubs in Montreal with badminton” and saw the logo for Club Atwater. On a whim, I scolled through their Facebook page and saw that their blue courts on a wood floor at least matched that of the screen grab. I went through all their still photos and found this old image, which made me very confident I had a solution. And this image from their web site was even better as the club has obviously made some updates and added new paint. Mea culpa: if I had stuck with the reverse image searches and used a screen shot of the interior, the Atwater web site would have come up immediately.

Now I wish I was a member of a private club with a reciprocal membership agreement with Atwater so I could play there when I visit Montreal in the future.