Are you talking about that Vaseline charge vs BJ Penn? I enjoy watching the fights but am not a serious student. But I thought GSP schooled BJP pretty badly vaseline or no.
There is a difference between what happened that night and cheating. Phil Nurse applied Vaseline to GSP’s face as he was supposed to do, and then moved on to that massage technique of his. In doing so, small amounts of the lubricant ended up on GSP’s back. Even if one argues that Nurse did this intentionally (he had one minute in which to hurry through a series of tasks - it’s not that hard to believe that he simply forgot to wipe his hands in such a scenario), there is no reason to believe that St-Pierre knew anything about it. In any case, it had very little impact on the fight, as GSP was wiped carefully with a towel between rounds after that. He also dominated every aspect of the fight. It’s not like the Vaseline helped his striking.
Now to keep my post from being a complete hijack, I think Bruce Lee may have done well in MMA if he’d been given a chance to train for it. If you were to import Bruce Lee exactly as he was to this time and did not give him a chance to train specifically for it, I’m convinced that he would get mauled by smaller fighters in the first round. With proper training, I’m sure he would have done just fine.
The issue is with the weight. Lee’s weight was somewhere around 135 lbs. Nobody outside of Japan fights at their actual weight. He would have to drop to 125 and still be a relatively small man. At that weight, he’d have a hard time finding a fight in North America at this point. The WEC is introducing a flyweight division, but I’m not sure if there are any interesting fights for him there yet. Even the Japanese organizations lack a flyweight division at this time. There’s a 123 class in Shooto, but that’s technically not MMA.