Laura Cover built a public profile of her own more than two decades ago and has spent the years since as the wife of one of the most recognizable figures in New York sports.
Born Laura Lee Phillips, she became a national name in October 1998 when she was named Playboy’s Playmate of the Month. This title led to television appearances, video features, and other modeling work throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s.
She stepped away from that career after meeting Aaron Boone, the former MLB infielder turned New York Yankees manager, and the two have now been married for more than two decades.
Today, Cover is known less for her modeling past than for raising four children, two biological and two adopted, and for the charity work she has kept largely out of the public eye.
Laura Cover Biography
She was born May 6, 1977, in Bucyrus, Ohio, to Jerry Thomas Phillips and Carole Phillips. Her mother worked as a registered nurse, and Laura Cover has said that background shaped her own interest in causes tied to health and children later in life.
She grew up in a Christian household in the small north central Ohio town. She was athletic from an early age, playing soccer and doing gymnastics through high school rather than pursuing anything connected to modeling or entertainment.
She had no modeling experience and no professional photos when she first visited a Playboy studio for an open call audition, a visit that led directly to her selection as Playmate of the Month for the October 1998 issue.
That single audition changed the direction of her twenties, launching a modeling and media career she had not been actively pursuing beforehand.
Career
Laura Cover’s Playboy work extended well beyond her original Playmate feature. She went on to appear in a number of Playboy video releases through the early 2000s, along with several newsstand special editions, and did additional modeling work for Mystique magazine and Talking Blue.
Her media appearances also included television, most notably a turn on the Playmate Edition of the game show Weakest Link, where she competed alongside other former Playmates including Shanna Moakler, Julie McCullough, Renee Tenison, and Jennifer Walcott, playing for charity money under the show’s British host Anne Robinson.
She also made guest appearances tied to her Playboy profile on The Howard Stern Show around the same period.
By the mid 2000s, Cover had stepped back from modeling almost entirely, choosing to focus on her growing family instead. She has not pursued a return to modeling or acting in the years since, and her public appearances today are almost entirely tied to Yankees-related events alongside her husband.
Aaron Boone’s Wife
Laura Cover married Aaron Boone on November 9, 2002, while he was still playing third base for the Cincinnati Reds, years before his move to the Yankees or his eventual shift into broadcasting and coaching.
The two have kept the details of how they met and how long they dated almost entirely private, a pattern that has held throughout their marriage.
Boone went on to play 13 seasons in the majors between 1997 and 2009, suiting up for the Reds, Yankees, Indians, Marlins, Nationals and Astros, and remains best known for hitting the walk-off home run that sent the Yankees past the Red Sox in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, one of the most replayed moments in Yankees history.
In 2009, while playing for the Astros, Boone was diagnosed with a bicuspid aortic valve condition that required open-heart surgery, a health scare that Cover went through while pregnant with their second child.
After retiring as a player, Boone spent 2010 through 2017 as a broadcaster for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball before the Yankees hired him as manager in December 2017, a role he has held since, guiding the team to the postseason in most of his seasons and to a World Series appearance in 2024.
Family
Cover and Boone have four children. Their son Brandon was born in 2005, and their daughter Bella followed in 2009. In 2012, the couple adopted two brothers, Sergot and Jeanel, from Haiti, expanding their family to six.
The family lived in Scottsdale, Arizona for years while Boone worked in broadcasting, then sold their Scottsdale home for roughly 3.2 million dollars in June 2018 and relocated to Greenwich, Connecticut shortly after Boone took the Yankees managerial job, putting them closer to the team’s home market in New York.
Cover has kept a relatively low profile since becoming a mother, appearing publicly mostly at Yankees games and team events.
She has spoken in past interviews about her charitable involvement, including work with a breast cancer foundation tied to her mother’s nursing background, and her sponsorship through the Christian Children’s Fund of a young boy in Guatemala, a commitment she has described as a small, personal way of contributing beyond her own family.
