"I passed out in the hallway, and the coaches were like,' Tyson, are you OK?' I was looking at them like they were crazy. ‘I'm OK. What are you talking about?'" Jolly recalls. "I just fell, because I fainted, but I didn't know I fainted. I thought I just fell. We went to the hospital, and they finally figured out that it was a pulmonary embolism. I had seven in my lungs, and they said one of them popped - a little one that popped - so that's why I fainted."
Jolly was taken to the Oklahoma University Medical Center, and a battery of tests showed that he had blockages in the main artery to his lungs, and inside his lungs were seven more blood clots, and more in the deep veins of his left leg.
A sharp hit to the back, taking contact under the basket - there were any number of ways that those clots could have not only ended Jolly's basketball career, but his life.
He underwent a procedure to remove all the blockages from his lungs, and was put on blood-thinning medication.
"I mean it's crazy," Jolly said, just minutes after signing his national letter of intent to play basketball at the University of California, Berkeley. "Especially thinking about it every day like, how I shouldn't have been playing. How I was told I wasn't going to play. And now I'm signing to a school in the PAC-12. It's a blessing."