Catching the android back hardware key event

Question

for some reason, I'm not catching the OnKeyDown of the hardware back button ONLY when a keyboard is on the screen. I catch the OnKeyUp in my SurfaceView class, but by then the screen has already attempted to resize.

I need to catch the OnKeyDown so I can notify some native code that the keyboard is being minimized before I get the sizechange event. Why isn't it being caught?