FanHouse SantinoQuaranta

WASHINGTON (AP) - Santino Quaranta broke a scoreless tie in the 75th minute and Brian Ching followed with a header in the 79th, giving the United States a 2-0 win against Honduras in the Gold Cup on Wednesday night.

The United States, two-time defending champion in the competition contested among the countries of North and Central America and the Caribbean, is 23-0-1 in Gold Cup group play..

It never ceases to amaze me how some people can fill themselves full of drugs and not kill themselves. There must be some sort of genetic trait -- we'll call it the Amy Winehouse gene -- that allows people to take 20 Vicodins, do a few lines of cocaine and chase it down with a bottle of Grey Goose without falling over dead.

Clearly, D.C. United forward Santino Quaranta has this gene. In this remarkable story in the Washington Post, the 23-year-old Quaranta goes into detail about how he got hooked on painkillers after a series of knee and groin injuries began wrecking his promising soccer career.

"The worst time was when I was healthy, because I had to go out and find more pills on my own on the street," he said. "Even when the doctors gave me pills, it was just 20 or 30. I would go through those in a couple hours. I would eat 10 at a time. ... You could have put me in Iraq and I would have found a way to get pills."

What's even more amazing about Quaranta is that he could afford to spend $500 a day on pills while pulling an MLS salary. Then again, money management is not a strong skill in teenagers. Quaranta, who was the youngest player in MLS history prior to Freddy Adu, is a prime example of the dangers of being a teenage pro athlete. It's even better, though, that he lived to tell the tale.