Former University Of Kentucky Men’s basketball coach Billy Gillispie, unceremoniously canned last March, is suing the school for breach of contract, with the following report brutally clipped from the Lexington Herald-Leader’s Ryan Alessi and Jerry Tipton.

Gillispie never signed a formal contract, but he was operating under a memorandum of understanding with the athletics association.

“Throughout the entirety of Coach Gillispie’s tenure, he treated it, correctly, as the binding, written contract between him and the defendant,” the suit says.

Gillispie is seeking $6 million that he says he is owed for “termination without cause,” according to the agreement.

The memorandum of understanding said that Gillispie, if fired, would be paid $1.5 million a year for up to four remaining years on the agreement.

In addition, the suit says UK lured Gillispie away from Texas A & M at a point when that university was negotiating to give him a contract extension through 2015. He also is seeking punitive damages and the cost of attorney fees.

Stuart Campbell, Gillispie’s agent, also declined to describe any settlement negotiations between the two sides.

When asked whether the two sides were close to an agreement, he laughed. “We’ll see what happens,” he said.

A better question might be how Campbell and Gillispie’s attorneys allowed their client to to toil for two entire seasons at Kentucky without a long-form agreement being signed by both sides. You know you’ve screwed up bigtime when Wally Backman’s lawyer is shaking his head.