By Richard Garner, Torch specialist

Picture the scene. The heel stable Legacy smashes the ankle of Shane McMahon between the two parts of the steel ring steps. Batista jogs-in for the save, but Orton and his accomplices run, despite their numerical advantage. Raw closes with the owner's son screaming in agony, selling the effects of steel-on-bone, while Orton vows that Batista will have his judgment day.

Good angle right? Well it probably would have been had Shane McMahon not just held his own against the World champion and the other two members of his stable.

There was once a time when the champion was protected. It would be a rarity that the champion would even be in trouble on television, yet alone pinned. But with the death of kayfabe comes the misguided notion that wins and losses are meaningless (after all, everyone knows its fake right?), which leads to the kind of aberration we saw on Monday night.

Raw opened with a match between Randy Orton and Shane McMahon. Gaining the advantage via a sneak attack, Shane continued to dominate the champion until Cody Rhodes and Ted DiBiase made the save. Its astonishing that Vince McMahon, who markets his wrestlers as larger-than-life "Superstars" would allow the World champion to be beaten up by an Executive Vice President who spends most of his time at the WWE offices in Stamford, Connecticut. The opening match set up an angle that would lead to Shane McMahon facing all three members of Legacy in the main event.

Cody Rhodes and Ted DiBiase have significant potential, so much so that DiBiase has been name-checked by several wrestlers as a future main event star, and as such need to be protected so that their long term marketability is not damaged. Yet they have spent the majority of 2009 selling the weak offense of Shane McMahon. If they become household names, they could feasibly be making the WWE money for the next twenty years, but politics dictate that they must put over the 39 year-old-son of the owner, who usually wrestles around ten matches a year.

This is symptomatic of WWE's problem in creating new stars. It has been referred to as "paying your dues," but the reality is that before any young wrestler can hope to get near the main event, they must have been pinned, beaten down, and embarrassed several times, damaging their credibility every step of the way.

Randy Orton who, not that long ago, was getting the kind of reaction that would warrant him turning to become the WWE's number one babyface, yet he has lost so much momentum since winning the Royal Rumble despite his title win. He has looked weak against Shane McMahon, struggling to overcome him in a series of evenly booked encounters. This was the case on Monday night again.

The main event could have been a beat down; it would hardly have harmed Shane McMahon's standing to have comprehensively lost a three-on-one handicap match to three of the WWE's top heels. Unfortunately, he more than held his own and Legacy had to sell his Hulk Hogan-esque comeback until he missed Orton with a flying elbow onto the announce table.

WWE is entertainment, not sports, as Vince McMahon was keen to emphasize at the WWE stockholders meeting last week. Yet it is difficult to identify who they have been entertaining with the monster push of Shane McMahon. As a name from the Attitude era, Shane could help Cody Rhodes and Ted DiBiase by making them look good, but instead the opposite is the case. That he did a stretcher job on Monday night suggests that his involvement with Legacy is over for the time being. And that is best for everyone, who isn't named McMahon, concerned.

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